LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap. , Copyright No. 



&G& 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



FOUR BIBLE STUDIES 



SHAMELESSNESS 
REVENGE 

PRAYER 

FIDELITY 



BY 

JOHN H. ?>S 




<;UUo 



»-& 



*.\ 



NEW Y^ORK 

A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 

51 East Tenth Street 
1896 



^ 






Copyright, 1896, by 
JOHN H. OSBORNE 



Press of J. J. Little & Co. 
Astor Place, New York 



PREFACE. 

It is with great diffidence, in view of the un- 
broken accord in interpretation of the long line of 
expositors hitherto, that three of these studies are 
now offered as new and better exegeses of three of 
the parables of our Lord. If from these, under 
guidance of the Spirit, some of the deep things of 
God shall appear as more easily to be fathomed, or 
if any suggestion has been furnished tending to 
clearer apprehension of the passages treated of, 
the purpose of this publication will have been fully 
answered. For, in our daily search of the Script- 
ures, as in the daily test of our inner spiritual life, 
the constant and reverent inquiry ever should be, 
whether these things are so ? and in both cases, not 
counting ourselves to have yet fully apprehended, 
the faithful endeavour should be to reach forward 
to the things that are before. 

It will be seen that, as the parables discussed in 
the first two studies both bear upon two different 
phases of the subject of prayer, the third study 
would naturally follow them, in order that the 
three together might set forth a more full and com- 
prehensive (though by no means an exhaustive) 
treatment of the whole subject of prayer. 

J. H. 0. 

Auburn, N. Y. 



CONTENTS. 

Shamelessness 1 

Revenge 22 

Prayer 47 

Fidelity 63 



SHAMELESSNESS. 

Luke xi. 1-10. 

The interpretation of this parable, The Friend at 
Midnight, now generally accepted, is : that the 
host, who, after receiving his travelling friend at 
midnight, goes to his neighbour's house to ask for 
food, represents the praying disciple ; and the 
householder roused up by him represents our Heav- 
enly Father: but interpreters are careful to state 
that there is a difference as to the methods of 
representation in these two portions of the parable ; 
the host, as he asks for bread is like unto and 
stands for the praying Christian ; but the house- 
holder is not like our Heavenly Father. In the 
case of the host, the lesson is said to be given by 
way of likeness, but in the other case it is said to 
be given by w r ay of contrast. It is allowed that the 
neighbour is like God in giving " as many loaves 
as he needeth," but that he is unlike Him in the 
exhibition of a morose and crabbed nature. 

Here we make the first issue and claim that it is 
not according to the functions of a parable, nor a 
legitimate exercise of its true methods, to teach by 
contrast or dissimilarity, but always by likeness or 
similarity. It is a 7tapa(3o\ri 7 a " casting along- 
side " the objects or truths to be illustrated, the 
objects that are to effect and make clear such illus- 
tration. The attributes and qualities of the divine 



2 Four Bible Studies. 

and spiritual are to be set forth and explained b}^ 
natural objects in which there are qualities, func- 
tions, and sometimes attributes bearing a likeness, 
ethically, to the objects, persons, or truths of a spir- 
itual nature. " Know ye not this parable, and how, 
then, will ye know all parables? " was the reply of 
our Lord when asked for a solution of the parable 
of The Sower ; as if the interpretation and appli- 
cation of a parable were so plain and easy that 
every one having ears to hear and eyes to see 
might understand it in its several parts, and might 
readily know to what truth or object each part 
was intended to refer by reason of its spiritual or 
ethical likeness to that truth or object. 

Thereupon Jesus gives the explanation of the 
parable. The sower is the Son of Man, the seed is 
the Word of God, the fowls by the wayside repre- 
sent Satan taking away the seed so it might not 
bear fruit ; the stony places are the stony hearts 
whereon the seed taking root will flourish for a 
short time and then be scorched up in the heat of 
tribulation and persecution ; the thorns that choke 
and render unfruitful the Word are the cares of this 
world, deceitfulness of riches, and lusts of other 
things ; the good ground is the good and honest 
heart, that nourishes the good seed until it brings 
forth most bountifully. In this exegesis given by 
our Lord there is a plain, direct, and self-evident 
likeness between each truth to be illustrated and 
the object in nature that illustrates it. The sower 
is " placed alongside " the Son of Man, and a like- 
ness appears at once ; He is in action perfectly and 
directly represented by the sower; so also, when 



Shamelessness. 3 

the fowls of the air are " placed alongside " Satan, 
the likeness in action is easily apparent, and there 
is no dissimilarity or contrast between them. This 
same line of remark will apply to the other mem- 
bers of the parable, the stony ground, the thorny, 
and the good ground. 

Thus is the true nature of every parable set forth 
by Jesus Himself ; always illustrating by similarity, 
never by contrast; always by likeness, never by 
unlikeness. Another fine example of this method 
is given by the Lord in His explanation of u The 
Tares of the Field " (Matt. xiii. 37-43). There the 
sower, the good seed, the field, the enemy, the har- 
vest, and the reapers, all and each, stand for charac- 
ter in persons, or qualities in things, of the king- 
dom of God, and the acts of the persons and the 
results following the operations in the harvest field 
of nature are types and emblems of similar acts 
and results in the spiritual and heavenly world. 
Thus every parable must, by virtue of its very con- 
stitution as a parable, operate on direct lines, and 
offer and bring out all its lessons on points of agree- 
ment, and not of difference. So was it in all other 
parables uttered by our Master ; the kingdom of 
Heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed ; is like 
unto leaven hid in meal ; is like unto treasure hid 
in a field ; is like unto a merchantman seeking 
goodly pearls ; is like unto a man that is an house- 
holder; is like unto a certain king who made a 
marriage for his son ; is like unto ten virgins ; is 
as a man travelling in a far country. In fact, the 
only two parables that have ever been made by 
expositors to teach thus wrongfully by contrast and 



4 Four Bible Studies. 

unlikeness are this one and that of the Unjust 
Judge. 

It cannot therefore be admitted that the neigh- 
bour in this parable can represent our Father by- 
contrast, but he must represent Him by similarity ; 
and the qualities in the character of the neighbour 
and his acts must and do, for the purposes of the 
parable, SQt forth like qualities and stand for sim- 
ilar actions, the outcome of the purposes and plans 
of our Heavenly Father. If, at this point, the de- 
vout reader is ready to lay down this paper and 
exclaim, " Surely God is not the crabbed, morose, 
and unlovely character personated in the neigh- 
bour," we can say in reply, " Have patience, and we 
may perhaps help you to see that the neighbour is 
not of such character at all." 

Taking up now the second issue on which we 
differ and dissent from the received exposition of 
the parable, in all the exegeses there is one propo- 
sition not expressed in terms, but always tacitly 
assumed and taken for granted; and out of this 
proposition, falsely assumed as a fact, and which 
we will show to have no reasonable basis, has 
been developed the false and unnatural interpreta- 
tion commonly accepted as the only valid one. 
That assumed proposition is that the traveller, 
arriving at midnight, was hungry and needed food, 
or that it was best and proper for him, whether 
hungry or not, to take food at that hour before 
lying down to rest till morning. But there is 
nothing to show that he was hungry, for the 
natural presumption is that he took his evening 
meal at the regular hour before starting on his 



SJiamelessness. 5 

journey ; he makes no plea of hunger and does not 
ask for bread ; yet, even if hungry, would it have 
been conducive to his health or comfort to take 
a meal at the midnight hour ? 

The physical constitution of man is the same in 
all ages ; we may therefore ask the question of 
ourselves as appropriate for the solution of this 
case, What would I do on arriving at my destina- 
tion, having before the start taken the usual even- 
ing meal, and then travelling by rail or stage till 
midnight ? I have put such a question to physi- 
cians and commercial travellers, and they, speak- 
ing the one from knowledge of physiology and the 
other from practical experience, all agreed that the 
sensible and healthful part for the traveller would 
be to go to bed, whether hungry or not, without 
taking food; the physician would say that the 
stomach, having digested the evening meal, should 
be allowed its usual rest during the remaining hours 
of the night, that if roused and compelled to fur- 
ther action, it must call upon the brain for an 
unwonted supply of nerve force, and the brain, 
thus kept active, cannot get the rest it should 
have in sleep ; the commercial traveller confirms 
this by his statement that food taken at that un- 
seasonable hour keeps him tossing and restless all 
the remaining hours of the night, so that morning 
finds him worn out and unrefresheci. We must, 
then, consider as altogether unfounded the assump- 
tion that, even by an overstrained rule of hospi- 
tality, the traveller should properly have had 
anything offered him at that time. 

A volume lately published by Canon H. B. Tris- 



6 Four Bible Studies. 

tarn, entitled " Eastern Customs in Bible Lands," 
furnishes, in a chapter headed " Journeying in the 
East," some very useful information on this point : 
" The requisites for an Eastern journey are few and 
simple — scrip, purse, and shoes ; though now, when 
the country is not under the settled rule which pre- 
vailed in the days of the Romans, a weapon of 
some kind or at least a stout cudgel must be 
added. The equipment was the same many ages 
before that period : for Homer (Odyssey, 17 — 197) 
describes Ulysses as travelling with a purse, a bag, 
and a staff, using the same word for scrip or bag 
which occurs in the New Testament. The purse 
is a small leather bag hung round the neck, under 
the shirt, by country folk, but concealed in the folds 
of the voluminous girdle worn by townsmen. It 
contains the owner's money and other valuables, 
especially the signet ring so treasured by every 
Arab, who always carries it in this purse. The 
scrip is a bag of larger dimensions, slung across the 
shoulder over the outer garment, generally made 
of leather, but, in the case of the poorest, of flexible 
matting, in which provision for the journey, usually 
olives, dried figs, and thin barley cakes, rolled up or 
folded square, is carried." 

It is thus clear that this traveller in our parable 
is to be regarded as already, and before his arrival 
at the house of his host, provided with any needed 
loaves contained in the " scrip" he carried. There 
is no intimation that he was furnished differently 
or with aught less than what travellers were accus- 
tomed to carry with them ; nor are we to take it 
for granted that the fact of the host asking the 



Sliamelessness. 7 

neighbour for bread, of itself implied the absence of 
that article from the traveller's scrip. Our Lord 
sets forth this man, the traveller, and in fact all the 
characters in all His parables, as acting under 
natural motives and according to the ordinary con- 
dition and mode of life of each of them.* 

We can now see that the host develops a charac- 
ter entirely different from that usually accorded 
him ; for it turns out that the request he made of 
the neighbour for the loaves was not a reasonable 
one for a necessary article, but the very opposite. 
The question therefore arises, Why should the host 
do so unreasonable and unnecessary an act, and 
what was his motive in doing it ? The answer is 
ready at hand in the one word that characterizes 
his action, dvaidiav, shamelessness ; for it was 
no motive of benevolence that led him to the 
neighbour's house, but a vain wish to make for him- 
self a certain kind of reputation with the guest and 
his neighbour and any others who would be sure to 
hear of the act he now proposed. 

Hospitality was accounted as one of the cardinal 
and almost saving virtues of his time and his peo- 
ple ; he would make a great show of zeal in fulfill- 
ing its duties on any occasion that might offer ; 
so he goes with ostentatious and inconsiderate 

* In the exposition of this parable by the Sunday School 
Times, in its issue of February 29, 1896, the following note 
is contributed by Rev. William Ewing : "Now the laws of 
(Eastern) hospitality lay it down that he who arrives after sun- 
set may be sent to sleep without supper ; that is to say, arriving 
at midnight, he had a right to shelter, but none to food. So this 
man acted within the understanding of hospitable duty in refus- 
ing to be disturbed at that hour of the night." 



8 Four Bible Studies. 

eagerness to the neighbour, regardless of the fact 
that he is asking for what is not at all needed, and 
reckless also of the outrage he is committing against 
all the kindly and considerate feelings of his neigh- 
bour. He had no plea of hunger from the traveller 
to urge; so the only reason he can give is one that 
relates to himself. " I have nothing to set before 
him"; it is the superserviceable " setting before" 
that constitutes his real motive, and not any desire 
to do his travelling friend a benefit ; he would 
have all the world know how zealous he is to fulfil 
the duties of a host at all times, even at the mid- 
night hour. "I have nothing to set before him" 
is the specious reason given for the demand, and it 
is left to the friend to infer, what the man would 
not declare outright, that there is a real need for 
the three loaves. Very clearly this man was of 
that blatant, shallow-minded sort, not sparsely met 
with in Oriental lands, who are ever thrusting for- 
ward their fine virtues and moral attainments " to 
be seen of men " ; they are constantly bringing 
them to the front on dress parade, and are seem- 
ingly haunted by the fear that all the good traits 
of their character will be, by the mass of men. 
overlooked and forgotten. 

The neighbour, however, is not moved by the 
appeal ; he may suspect it has no genuine basis, 
but at least he knows his friend of old, and under- 
stands his reckless spirit and brazen ways ; he gives 
at first a prompt refusal ; a request perfectly rea- 
sonable at a reasonable hour deserves no attention, 
no consideration now ; no plea of a benevolent 
motive has been made to him, and this display of 



Shamelessness. 9 

shamelessness by his friend calls for no act of 
benevolence or good-will in return ; it is quite 
proper for him to return a selfish response to the 
selfish request, Mi] jxoi nonovs ndpex^, " Do not 
bring troubles upon me." The rendering in the 
Authorized and Kevised versions of these four 
Greek words bv the three English words " trouble 
me not," is a very inadequate translation ; this 
phrase, Honor 7taf)ex 8lv ? is thus mistranslated not 
only in this parable and that of the Unjust Judge, 
but also at Matt. xxvi. 10 and at Galatians vi. 17 ; 
in Matthew, our Lord in rebuke of the unjust criti- 
cisms spoken against that Mary who poured the 
ointment on His feet, exclaimed, "Why do you 
bring trouble upon the woman ? " in anticipation 
of the wrong and wicked slanders that might be 
sent forth about her from envious tongues, to injure 
her. good name and cast a cloud upon her fair 
character ; these were the " troubles " such words 
as they had spoken would " bring upon" her, and 
He then and there interposed in her behalf, declar- 
ing that the account of this act of hers should form 
part of the imperishable record of His own life, 
and thus the memory of it would be preserved to 
the remotest ages of the world. 

Paul's adjuration in his letter to the Galatians, 
Tov Xoinov uonovs juoi pujdels 7rapex6TGD, was 
made in view of the questions about circumcision 
that had come up, and troubled the disciples while 
he was staying in Antioch, Lystra, and Derbe, as 
they are stated in Acts xv. and xvi. ; so, in 
writing to the Galatians, he admonishes them of 
the futility of such questions, raised as they are by 



10 Four Bible Studies. 

those who " desire to make a fair show in the 
flesh " and that they may escape " persecution for 
the cross of Christ." Circumcision is nothing, but 
a newly created mind and heart are everything ; 
these zealots for outward conformity do not keep 
the law ; their only glory is in the numbers of their 
followers ; but Paul's glory is in that symbol of 
shame, the Cross ; let no man now wantonly 
attempt to bring troubles any more upon him; 
the welts upon his body yet remaining from the 
jailer's lash at Philippi were the ariy^xara to testify 
of him that he was the Lord's bondman ; all ques- 
tions about customs and requirements under the 
old law were obsolete, and agitation of them in the 
churches could only bring useless trouble upon Paul. 
To the careful student of the Greek, therefore, 
this must appear as the only true and adequate 
rendering of the four words of adjuration as Luke 
has written them in this parable ; they mean much 
more than to say : " Do not bother me," or " Stop 
this worrying," for they signify an actual trouble 
that is to be brought on the neighbour through 
compliance with the demand of his friend. If our 
Lord meant that the former was only protesting 
against a mere teasing by the host, there are three 
or four single verbs any one of which He would 
have employed to express this, and with far greater 
accuracy than b} r this phrase of four words 
which He has put in the mouth of the house- 
holder. See Luke vii. 6, viii. 49 ; Acts xvii. 8 ; 
Gal. i. 7, v. 10. 

Thus the neighbour's thought is not that he is 
personally pestered, irritated, and provoked ; but 



Sliamelessness. 1 1 

he means that the host's irrational conduct will 
" brin£ troubles " as its result : and we can well 
understand what those troubles would be; the 
noise of unlocking and opening the door, and the 
drawing off from his children the covering that is 
over both him and them will awaken them, and so 
the cold, the noise, and the voice to them strange 
at this hour in their half-awakened state, all in the 
deep darkness of the night, must set his children in 
great fright with crying and screams and calls for 
"Papa" ; but expostulation is of no avail with the 
shameless and reckless petitioner; the neighbour 
quickly perceives this, and promptly decides that 
the easiest way out of this predicament is to get up 
at once, give the man his loaves, and send him off 
as soon as possible ; he will not stop to count them 
in the darkness, but will be sure to give him more 
than he asks for, so that he will not return. We 
need not assume that in doing this he is actuated 
by the least ill-will or by any thought of unkind- 
ness ; his conduct is simply governed by and suited 
to the facts of the case ; while he well understands 
the pleader's motive, he does not indulge in recrimi- 
nation or passion ; he calmly and practically acts 
according to the circumstances of the moment, and 
merely in a way to avoid the " troubles." The 
picture commonly drawn of this scene, repre- 
senting the host as standing without for quite a 
time and making repeated requests, using " impor- 
tunit} r ," is not the true one ; importunity is the last 
thing the neighbour can allow ; it is the one event 
of all others to be prevented or arrested, for the 
longer the importunity the greater the " troubles " ; 



12 Four Bible Studies. 

it must be cut off short ; so he rises at once and 
stops it by giving the man what he wants. 

The right rendering of the Greek word avaidiav 
is not " importunity," but shamelessness ; the very 
composition of the word indicates its meaning, 
" without shame." And here we must come to 
the conclusion that the translators of the Authorized 
version nearly three hundred years ago adopted 
this wrong word, importunity, as a necessary con- 
sequence of their wrong interpretation of the 
parable ; the error of it began then, for, wrongly 
assuming that the host was in the right with his 
petition, they could not see wherein he was shame- 
less ; so they had to make a new meaning for the 
word; in this way it undoubtedly was that the wrong 
exegesis of the first part of this parable determined 
and made necessary the translation of this word 
into " importunity," and this meaning was adopted 
also in order to preserve a consistent exegesis in its 
latter part. Having been mistranslated in our Eng- 
lish Bibles for two hundred and eighty years, it must 
now perforce appear in our Greek lexicons as one 
of the meanings of avaidiav $ but it should not be 
forgotten that it was the wrong translation that 
created the wrong dictionary meaning, and not 
the dictionary meaning that made the wrong 
translation ; the Revised version has simply fol- 
lowed in the same line of error {vide Alford in loco). 

It must be believed that our Master exercised at 
least ordinary care and precision in the use of 
words, and that He would not employ any terms in 
His discourse except such as would convey His 
thought accurately and with definite clearness; 



Shamelessness. 1 3 

therefore, if He had meant only "importunity " in 
this case, He would have spoken a more appropriate 
word than dvaidiav - or, if He uttered this parable 
in Aramaic, then Luke, in selecting the right word 
in Greek for the purpose of this record, did cer- 
tainly take pains to give us this as the one word 
justly and accurately corresponding to the Aramaic 
word Jesus had used ; for if He had really intended 
" importunity " there are Greek words that would 
have much better conveyed His thought, such as 
some of the compounds of ai'teao, as npoaairr]aiv y 
or napairrfaiVy or enairrjGiv. But He used a 
word which, both by general usage of that time 
and by derivation, bore the meaning " without 
shame." We have endeavoured to show that the 
term "shamelessness" applies not simply to the 
act of asking, but also to the character of the host, 
and to his conduct as the natural exhibition of his 
heedless selfishness, and that the neighbour's knowl- 
edge of this trait, and thus his ready appreciation 
of the uselessness of remonstrance, prompted him 
to quickly give all and more than was asked for. 
So that to put importunity in place of shameless- 
ness is absolutely to reverse the parable, to turn it 
around and make it teach just the opposite of what 
it does teach. 

And now, under our right exegesis, what is the 
application of the parable? Jesus himself gives it 
in the next sentence — "Ask and ye shall receive, 
seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened 
unto you ; for every one that asketh receiveth, and 
he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh 
it shall be opened." Here are simply six repeti- 



14 Four Bible Studies. 

tions of the same thought, and there is nothing 
more in them than the assurance, u Your prayers 
shall be answered, your prayers shall be answered," 
six times repeated and variously given to make 
it tremendously emphatic, and as if our dear Sav- 
iour would impress the fact on our memories with 
such force and vividness that it might never be for- 
gotten. Much paper has been spoiled in the attempt 
to set forth the supposed figurative meanings of 
these six phrases, but such expositions are to be 
discredited as overstrained, far-fetched, and at va- 
riance with that direct and simple clearness in 
method which always constitutes the power and 
charm of Jesus' teaching ; we are simply to accept 
them in their plain intent and meaning, and as 
evidence of the intense earnestness of Jesus in 
assuring us that our prayers can never fail of an 
answer. These two verses, Luke xi. 9, 10, are to 
be cherished as next in value to John iii, 16 ; the 
latter is precious to the penitent seeking for pardon 
and salvation, but the former is the golden signet- 
ring given into the hand of the redeemed by which 
he makes claim to the royal heritage pledged in 
the words, " If ye abide in me and my words abide 
in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be 
done unto you." 

But there is another lesson to be drawn from the 
parable. God sees our thoughts and knows our 
motives, whatever our acts and words may be. The 
host, rousing up his friend, was not at heart a bad 
character; he was vain, fond of displaying his vir- 
tues, inconsiderate of others, selfish and persistent 
where his own advantage was concerned ; but, in 



SJiamelessness. 15 

all, he was honest and sincere ; he did not pretend 
that the traveller was hungry, but frankly gave the 
reason for his petition as one relating to himself 
alone; though his motive was "not of the highest 
and purest, he yet obtained the bread and thus an 
answer to his prayer. God is in heaven and we 
upon earth ; He knows what we have need of be- 
fore we ask Him; He can make allowance for all 
our ignorance, our mistakes, misjudgments, preju- 
dices, likes and dislikes, our disregard of others 
or lack of consideration for them, our selfishness 
and vanity. We do not know our own hearts fully 
and cannot ever know how much " shamelessness " 
arising from these qualities God sees in us when we 
offer prayer ; but if we are sincere and true, and 
particularly if our prayers can abide the test the 
Apostle James has given, that we ask not to u con- 
sume it upon our lusts," then we may feel some as- 
surance that our prayers will have an answer. The 
petition of the host began and ended with self ; our 
prayers are too often shameless in beginning and 
ending with self, yet God hears and answers them. 
The demand of the host must have come upon 
his friend at midnight with very* much of a shock, 
at both its untimeliness and the lack of a valid 
reason for it ; in his first hasty thought his re- 
monstrant mood makes him say, " I cannot rise 
and give thee," but his second thought is, " Yes, I 
can, and that is the best way to deal with this 
strange and foolish request." Is it not so many 
times with God when our prayers at first go up 
before Him ? The absurdities in them which we 
do not see are so open to Him ; looking at them 



16 Four Bible Studies. 

from His own point of view, He would deem it 
impossible to grant them; but regarded from our 
point of view and as we think they would affect 
ourselves and others, He sees the best course is to 
answer them. 

But still further than this, there is a spiritual 
shamelessness actually enjoined upon us, both by 
the lesson of the parable and by that of the pas- 
sage immediately preceding it. A disciple has 
just besought Jesus, " Lord, teach us to pray," and 
in response He gives them the Lord's Prayer. 
Now, since the parable directly follows the prayer 
with naught else between, we may fairly infer that 
it was spoken altogether in illustration and expo- 
sition of it ; and thus we might expect to find in 
the several petitions of the prayer the elements of 
a spiritual shamelessness corresponding closely to 
the shamelessness in word and act of the midnight 
petitioner. Consider the first four petitions of 
the Lord's Prayer : " Hallowed be Thy name 
{dyiaadrjtGo) ; Thy kingdom come (jXdarGo) ; Give 
(Si'Sov) us each day our daily bread; And forgive 
(£$€$) us our sins, for we also forgive every one 
that is indebted to us." The imperative verbs in 
these four requests are very significantly put in 
the aorist tense, and they furnish a broad, per- 
vasive, and inclusive sweep for the meaning of 
every sentence. Thus the four petitions may be 
read : " Let Thy name be hallowed completely, 
immediately, universally; May thy kingdom come 
at once and everywhere; Supply our temporal 
needs fully to-day ; Forgive us our debts fully and 
completely, for after that manner have we for- 



Shamelessness. 1 7 

given our debtors." In these four of its terms the 
Lord's Prayer is positive, unconditional, downright ; 
and their very brevity implies their comprehensive 
scope. 

Whatever may be our conclusions as to the 
answers God makes to our prayers, there can be no 
doubt here as to the intent of our Lord to have 
His prayer (the model for all others) framed upon 
these lines of positive and direct supplication, and 
for present and immediate benefits. How to pray 
is one thing, how God answers prayer is another 
and very different thing ; our prayers for all good 
objects may be conceived in a spirit of great ex- 
aggeration and unbounded expectancy ; this is 
what our Lord commands and commends and 
exemplifies in the model set for us: "After this 
manner pray ye" (Matt. vi. 9). Consider for a 
moment what a climax of spiritual shamelessness 
is in these words : " And forgive us our sins ; for 
we also forgive everv one that is indebted to us." 
A certain servant owed his lord ten thousand tal- 
ents, but when about to be sold with wife and 
children, he appealed successfully to the mercy of 
his lord and was forgiven the debt ; the same ser- 
vant, however, could not forgive a fellow-servant 
one hundred pence. Ten thousand (silver) talents 
are fifteen million dollars ; one hundred pence are 
fifteen dollars. Now, it is fair and natural to be- 
lieve that Jesus, in naming these two sums, had in 
mind a sense of the difference between them and 
that He intended by them to represent, not accu- 
rately nor to any minute particular indeed, but 
still in some proportional measure, the relation our 



18 Four Bible Studies. 

sins against God bear to the sins of our fellow-men 
against us; He might have named one talent or 
even ten talents in place of one hundred pence, or 
five thousand in place of the ten thousand talents, 
and then the difference would have seemingly been 
almost great enough ; but by what He did say, He 
without doubt meant that there was virtually an 
infinite degree of proportion between the two cases 
of debt ; and we are to interpret the expressions as 
constituting a declaration that the sins of others 
against us are to be accounted as nothing in com- 
parison with our sins against our Heavenly Father. 
Yet in this prayer we are to ask Him to forgive us 
our infinite debt when we have forgiven our fellow- 
man a paltry nothing, and are to boldly proffer 
this fact of our forgiveness of mere trifles as a valid 
and sufficient REASON for His forgiveness ! ! ! 
Oh, the unbounded shamelessness of it ! When 
did ever human reason or love operate to make 
fifteen dollars equal in a spiritual or moral applica- 
tion to fifteen millions ? yet here they are made so 
in the equations of God's arithmetic, and we see 
them, by a rule of divine dynamics, set in precious 
equipoise, swinging free in opposite scales with 
level beam and even balance ! Observe the notable 
difference between the passage here and as it 
occurs in Matthew's Gospel, " Forgive us, for we 
also forgive," nai TAP avroi acfriopiev $ while in 
Matthew it is : " As we also have forgiven," gds 

Having thus, under our new interpretation, found 
the true lessons of the parable, let us draw a com- 
parison between the new and the old. The old 



Sliamelessness. 1 < ) 

and erroneous exposition represents the traveller as 
desiring or needing food at midnight, a time when 
it is neither natural nor healthful to take it, nor 
made obligatory under the rules of hospitality to 
furnish it ; it ignores also the custom of travellers 
to carry their own loaves with them in their scrip. 
The host is represented as perfectly right and rea- 
sonable in waking up his neighbour and urging a 
petition for food ; the neighbour is all wrong in 
objecting, in manner and words he is surly and 
cross, and gives the bread only after much " im- 
portunity." The application is, we must always go 
to God with proper requests and great importunity, 
for He loves our clamour and delays answer in or- 
der to enjoy our repeated appeals, just as an earthly 
father enjoys the teasing of his children ; but God 
is not like the neighbour in that the latter was 
morose and sullen in his giving. Thus the parable 
is lamely made to deny its own nature, in giving a 
lesson by contrast and not, according to the true 
constitution of a parable, by likeness. 

In opposition to this, our new exposition declares 
that the traveller did not need food and was not 
entitled to it as a guest, or that, if he did need, he 
had it with him ; that the host was doing an unnec- 
essary act in rousing up the neighbour, and that the 
latter gave the shameless one at once all that he 
asked for. Our application is that, in spite of any 
extravagance or impropriety in our prayers, God 
does hear and answer them ; He loves us for the 
motives that prompt to shamelessness in asking for 
any good thing, but He does not love us for mere 
importunity, and He has assured us that He will 



20 Four Bible Studies. 

certainly answer our prayers. Our Lord has given 
us encouragement in this by the unlimited terms in 
which nearly all the petitions of His model prayer 
are conceived. The Apostle Paul confirms us in 
this blessed assurance, declaring in his letter to the 
Ephesians (iii. 20) that " God is able to do exceed- 
ing abundantly above all that w^e ask or think." 
There is a tremendous sweep in these words. Do 
we ask for all, everything good we would have 
done ? He is able to do exceeding abundantly 
above that ; but we are not able to ask or even to 
think of all the good things He is able to do ; we 
cannot THINK of enough good things to have 
done! 

Nor is there need to be very choice or precise in 
the selection of our words. To show this, Paul in 
another place (Komans viii. 26, 27) sets forth the 
manner in which God receives and interprets our 
petitions. We know not what we should pray for 
as we ought, so the Spirit helps our infirmities and 
makes up for our ignorance and our failure to com- 
prehend all the glorious possibilities open to us 
through prayer; so far from making selection of 
subjects, or fine choice of words ; so far from con- 
fining ourselves to those things which to our limited 
view seem only the proper things to be prayed for, 
we may go as the host did, careless about words or 
about proprieties of time or place, and with shame- 
lessness ask, knowing that we can never ask enough ; 
for we are assured that He that searcheth our hearts 
knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit when 
that Spirit translates our weak, ill-directed, dis- 
jointed, and thinly-diluted prayers into such ripe, 



Shamelessness. 2 1 

rounded, symmetrical prayers as shall call down 
from heaven a response fully in consonance with 
that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. 
There are thus furnished to us in this parable rea- 
sons without number or limit for going boldly to 
The Throne of Grace. 



EEVENGE. 

Luke xviii. 1-8, 

This parable was spoken " to the end that men 
ought always to pray and not faint." The inter- 
pretation generally given is : that a widow, by her 
importunity, obliged an unwilling and unjust judge 
to grant the justice rightfully her due from her ad- 
versary ; and the lesson is said to be, that we should 
use importunity in our prayers, going often with 
the same petition to God; He loves to hear us 
pray, takes pleasure in our importunity, and, after 
withholding for a time the answer, eventually 
grants what we ask. Our faith is also said to be 
increased and strengthened by this persistence in 
prayer. In this parable also, as in that of the 
Friend at Midnight, there is one character by 
w T hom the lesson is said to come in the way of 
contrast and not of likeness ; it is asserted that God 
cannot be like the unjust judge, indifferent as to 
the righteousness or unrighteousness of His own 
conduct and the administration of His own govern- 
ment; that, in contrast to the unjust judge, He is 
always willing to hear us, and that if an unjust 
judge was constrained by importunity to grant a 
helpless widow's request, much more our Father, a 
just judge, will be moved by our importunity. 

We take decided exception to this interpretation 
and to its application, and, as in the former parable, 



Revenge. 23 

declare that the unjust judge represents God di- 
rectly and by likeness in both his acts and words, 
and does not represent Him by way of contrast or 
unlikeness. We are to have the judge " cast along- 
side " of God as in the true method of a napafiokri, 
and in all that he does and says he is acting in a 
truly parallel way, and illustrates God's methods 
and plans as directly as any character in any other 
parable spoken by Jesus. On a close study it will 
be seen that in both Authorized and Revised ver- 
sions the following words and phrases have not 
been correctly translated : First, in the reason 
given by the judge for a change in his conduct 
toward the widow, Stays to 7tap£X eiv M 01 nonov 
r?)v x r lP ay ravr?]v 7 the translation is, "because 
this widow troubleth me " ; but the true meaning 
to be given it is, " because this widow is bringing 
trouble upon me " ; in the wrong translation the 
thought is, "she is a pestering, teasing, worrying 
creature," but by the right rendering the thought 
is, "there is a real, tangible trouble she is bringing 
upon me as a consequence of this continual com- 
ing." Secondly, the words iva jat) vncsoniaar) /as 
are rendered, "lest she weary me," but the right 
meaning is, " lest she give me a black eye " ; the 
thought is, not that the woman will pester the 
judge till he is tired out, and so yields from mere 
intolerance of her worriments, but it is that a black 
eve will be given him through her coming ; this 
black eye being a more specific name for, or a cul- 
mination of, the "trouble" she was to bring on 
him. What was meant by the black eye will be 
shown further on, 



24 Four Bible Studies. 

Thirdly, Our Lord says (7th and 8th verses) 
noirjaei rr)v aHdiurjGiv, Wk He will (do or work or) 
make revenge for His chosen " ; this is the literal 
and correct translation, and the two words should 
be so rendered in English that they may preserve 
the full force of the Greek, and not by the milder 
and weaker phrase, " He will avenge " ; for the 
thought is of an intense purpose by our Heavenly 
Father to do very effectively and completely what- 
ever He would do for His elect. These two ex- 
pressions, made up of the verb with the noun, are 
thus notably twice repeated in this application 
made by our Lord of the parable. Again, in the 
first part of the parable, there are presented by 
the current method of exposition other wrong 
readings of certain terms. The w r ord "avenge," 
as used by the widow, is made to mean " do right 
or do justice"; such rendering is utterly inade- 
quate; eKdiHTjaor pis (the aorist of the imperative) 
in the mouth of the woman plainly means " avenge 
me" ; mere right or justice is not what she is ask- 
ing for ; it is something more than these and very 
much more; she is set on securing a recompense 
beyond what is just or right ; she demands revenge. 
She does not say, diitaiGoaov /*£, "do me justice," 
which would be the proper verb if only justice was 
sought for, but inSiK^aov pte 9 " avenge me"; and 
e)t8iuri6is, for its full and true significance, can 
never be restricted to mean only Shir}. 

One principal difference between this present 
interpretation of the parable and the exegesis 
hitherto generally accepted consists in the differ- 
ence in application of the Greek word endiur/cris 



Revenge. 25 

or £KSiHr)6GQ and of the English word " avenge." 
To illustrate: A may do an injury to B, and B 
may express in English a desire to be avenged for 
that injury ; such an expression is susceptible of 
two meanings: either (c) that B should receive a 
recompense exactly and justly commensurate with 
the injury, which would be simple justice; or (d) 
that this recompense should exceed the limit of 
what would be rightfully and equitably due him ; 
and then it would be revenge. But it will be 
found, upon a close study of all those passages 
in the New Testament and Septuagint in which 
iudj,KT)6is and its co-derivatives are employed, that 
those words in all of them bear the wide and com- 
prehensive meaning indicated in (d) ; and that the 
significance of them would be unwarrantably re- 
stricted, and the true and full tenor of those 
passages would be lost, if their application were 
to be limited as set forth in (c). Thus it may be 
seen that the usage of the English " avenge " is 
much broader in scope than that of the Greek 
word, since it is in our modern tongue loosely 
and without discrimination applicable to any case 
of recompense, whether of justice or revenge. 

Therefore, proceeding from such conclusion in 
this present case, it must appear as a fact estab- 
lished, that the limitation by interpreters of the 
widow's appeal to a demand for mere justice can- 
not be constituted from a proper application of the 
Greek word eudiHr/Gov. The broad and loose 
usage of the English word " avenge " has thus 
misled our exegetes into the wrong assignment 
to the Greek word of a meaning more restricted 



26 Four Bible Studies. 

and narrow than its usage by contemporary Greek 
authors would sanction. Indeed, the tendency has 
ever been to minimize the meanings of words and 
phrases of this parable in some instances, and to 
" strain" the meanings in others. It must be be- 
lieved that our Divine Master exercised at least 
ordinary intelligence in the choice of words, and 
that Luke, under guidance of the Holy Spirit, as 
well as of his own mental power to discriminate, 
chose the right Greek words to express the thoughts 
uttered by our Saviour in Aramaic, if He did so 
utter them. There was a purpose definitely exer- 
cised in the selection of the characters of the para- 
ble, and in the words that set forth their thoughts 
and acts. The selection of an unjust instead of a 
just judge was for a purpose ; there was a signifi- 
cance in making a widow the petitioner rather 
than any other character; it was for a purpose 
and with right appreciation of the force of the 
words that Jesus four times spoke of revenge and 
not once of justice ; if He had used this latter term 
but once in the parable, there might have been 
some slight ground for regarding the two terms 
as convertible, but as He did not, we are fairly to 
conclude that He used the word ht§iKr)6iv in its 
ordinary and accepted Greek sense. 

Too often, apparently, an excessive fear of mak- 
ing a parable "go on all fours " has restrained 
expositors from giving to each character and act 
and expression in a parable its proper representa- 
tive value ; such a fear has doubtless operated in 
this instance to nullify and make valueless the 
words and acts of the two persons in the parable ; 



Revenge. 27 

attention has been strongly fixed upon the " im- 
portunity " supposed to be its only lesson, the 
word-meanings have been made adjustable as 
closely as might be to that, and no stress at all 
has been laid upon the peculiar and operative 
words and sentences evidently framed with a fine 
discriminative sense of their import by our Great 
Teacher, that they might convey clearly and ac- 
curately all of the lesson He intended. The warn- 
ing against going on all fours might well enough 
be addressed, as doubtless it often was of old, to 
those hair-splitting scribes who could make their 
microscopic analyses so fine as to discover mean- 
ings in the turn of every letter or in its position 
on the parchment roll ; who could strain out gnats 
and swallow many a camel in their elaborate and 
fantastic expositions of the Law ; but we need not, 
in this day of enlightenment, be restrained, through 
any consideration of its abuse, from putting to its 
right and fairly intended use every portion of these 
divine teachings of Jesus ; and we need claim for 
Him simply the same discretion in the ordinary 
use of language that we ourselves would have. 

© © 

It certainly could not be that He, in all other 
cases so careful and unerring in diction, should in 
the two instances of these parables have been so 
very negligent and clumsy ; it is preferable, at all 
hazards, to take these terms in their plain, usual, 
and open sense, and if that does not lead us to a 
natural and fair explanation, then to confess our 
inability to find a present solution, and wait in 
patience, ignorant of the precious lesson, until the 
Spirit of Truth may give such spiritual insight into 



28 Four Bible Studies. 

" the deep things of God " as will enable us to fully 
unfold them in their beauty and power. Mean- 
while, and with earnest prayer for that light, let 
one humble attempt here be made to bring out 
what may be deemed its right interpretation. 

A widow comes to the court of an unjust judge ; 
she can come because she is a widow, uncontrolled 
by any one ; a wife or daughter could not come, 
for the Oriental husband or father, if he approved 
of the cause, would come himself in their place, 
and if he disapproved would not allow them to 
come ; a man would not be allowed to come, even 
" for a while," for he could be more summarily 
dealt with than a woman, and driven with blows 
from the judgment seat. So it is a widow, one 
with the privilege to come " continually," who 
appears before a judge, not of righteousness, but 
of unrighteousness, and pleads, " avenge me of my 
adversary." Evidently, Ave are not to regard this 
woman as like other widows referred to in the 
Bible; she was not of the weak-minded, nerveless 
sort, yielding without opposition to any oppression 
it was the common custom to visit upon defence- 
less widows of that time ; the fact of coming with 
a petition for revenge marks her as of strong will 
and probably unscrupulous purpose ; so that, not 
tamely submitting to injustice, she is before the 
judge, with full resolution and a settled plan for 
getting even and more than even with her adver- 
sary. She comes to an unjust, not to a just judge, 
for the former could give her revenge, but the lat- 
ter only justice. The judge allows her to come for 
a while, in\ xpovov y but at the end of that " while," 



Revenge. 29 

however long it may have been, lie finds it not best 
for him to let her come any longer; she is bring- 
ing trouble and must be stopped, for if her coming 
should be continual, ii$ reXos, she would give him 
a black eye. It is evident from the manner of 
statement that in the judge's view the uonov and 
the v7tGD7tiaaiv are the same, or at least that the 
former is a direct and immediate result of the lat- 
ter. What, then, is the " trouble,'' and what the 
" black eye " ? 

To define the latter first, the term clearly has 
here no meaning of a physical import; there was 
no danger that the kadi, sitting in a public place, 
attended by servants and officers of his court to 
keep between himself and the suitors and audience 
such respectful distance as would secure due main- 
tenance of dignity and safety, would be struck in 
the face and under the eve bv the fist of the woman 
in a fit of desperation and despair. The term has 
only an ethical meaning here, the same as it has 
with us to-day ; that is, to get a black eye means 
to have one's plans defeated, to be disappointed as 
to results expected from certain events or acts, to 
be overthrown by some sudden and unpreventable 
disaster. Paul used it in such ethical sense when 
describing his manner of fighting the entangling 
lusts of the body; he made no feint of the fight- 
ing, throwing out his fists at random as one that 
beateth the air, but straight, solid blows were de- 
livered right " under the eye," and thus his pas- 
sions were sent to grass and there kept under. His 
figures were borrowed from the prize-ring in this 
instance, as they were in some others. What was 



30 Four Bible Studies. 

the particular ethical character of this black eye in 
the judge's case? 

For an Eastern judge there were no set codes of 
laws as in Western countries, carefully and elabo- 
rately framed, defining and classifying offences, and 
appointing a fit and well-measured punishment for 
each ; with no guide of this sort, and unfettered 
by any rules confining his action within well-set 
bounds, he was free to give judgment according to 
a few plain general principles of right as he might 
apprehend them, and to order his decrees under 
that simple moral code, short and unwritten, which 
in all ages and nations has bounded almost the 
entire scope of duty as between man and man. 
"With a power thus practically unlimited, he both 
made and executed his law ; with good common 
sense, ready seizure of the main points of a case, 
quick sagacity in applying the remedy or penalty, 
and, lastly, an honest purpose to do right, he was 
the ideal kadi of the Orient, well equipped for dis- 
pensing a rude justice fairly and efficiently ; there, 
as here, the impartial judge is in high honour, and 
his decrees are accepted and obeyed as the un- 
avoidable decrees of fate. Before such a judge of 
righteousness immediate and complete relief is the 
result of his trial to every suitor, and he would not 
be put off unless for the purpose of obtaining new 
evidence. The judgment rendered by King Solo- 
mon (1 Kings iii. 16-28) in the case of a claim by 
two women of the same living child, is a fine ex- 
ample of the methods and ways open to an honest 
Eastern judge in arriving at a just and instant de- 
cision ; the whole transaction might not have occu 



Revenge. 31 

pied more than fifteen minutes. To the mind of 
an Oriental, therefore, delay by a judge for days 
in giving judgment would appear strange and unac- 
countable; inquiries would arise as to the reasons 
for a suitor to be "continually coming"; if sus- 
picions were well founded that he had a case too 
complicated for him to master, or, if able, he was 
unwilling for sordid or dishonest reasons to give a 
decision, then, and in either instance, his capacity 
and integrity would, in the popular thought, re- 
ceive a serious blo\^; all trust in his uprightness 
would be gone, his unfitness for the office made 
clear; he would receive (almost without metaphor) 
a black eye in the loss of his reputation and of the 
confidence of the community ; for it is true in East- 
ern, as in Western lands, no judge can long hold 
office who administers it without the " fear of God 
or the regard of man." And the consequences 
might not stop there ; reports of his inefficiency 
and dishonesty would reach the ears of his supe- 
riors, and if proved true, he would lose his office, 
and might lose his head. 

It is clear, therefore, that the continual coming, 
of this woman must be stopped if this unjust judge 
would avert the disaster sure to follow ; and so far 
from allowing her any exercise of "importunity," 
it is the very condition most to be dreaded and 
avoided. The "for-a- while" has been alreadv too 
far prolonged ; the trouble she is bringing will surely 
draw on its dread result if any importunity is per- 
mitted. He will prevent it at once by granting her 
prayer, giving her the revenge she asks ; to give 
mere justice would not be enough; it would not 



82 Four Bible Studies. 

stop her coming; she could and would, with a 
woman's persistence, come again. She knew that 
from an unjust judge she could as well have re- 
venge as justice ; she held the key of the situation, 
so that he " who feared not God nor regarded 
man " is constrained to do the behest of a defence- 
less, powerless woman. The tables are, in a man- 
ner, turned ; the two parties change positions : she 
is the real judge and arbiter of his fate ; he is help- 
lessly compelled to do her wishes, and there is no 
other resource left him. He might now offer to 
give her justice, to have her adversary appear with 
her before him, to hear both sides, and decide im- 
partially and justly ; but it is not the nature of an 
unjust judge to do that. It is also too late now ; his 
office and possibly life are in instant peril ; the one 
thing to do is to grant her prayer and stop her 



coming. 



In the work by Canon Tristam, entitled " East- 
ern Customs in Bible Lands," there is an interesting 
passage in the chapter entitled " Eastern Jurispru- 
dence," pages 228 and 229, as follows : " I well re- 
member a scene which vividly re-enacted the par- 
able of the ' Unjust Judge.' It was in the ancient 
city of Nisibis, in Mesopotamia. Immediately on 
entering the ^ate of the citv, on one side stood the 
prison with its barred windows, through which the 
prisoners thrust their arms and begged for alms. 
Opposite was a large open hall, the court of justice 
of the place. On a slightly raised dais at the 
further end sat the kadi or judge, half buried in 
cushions. Round him squatted various secretaries 
and other notables. The populace crowded into 



Revenge. 33 

the rest of the hall, a dozen voices clamouring at 
once, each claiming that his cause should be first 
heard. The more prudent litigants joined not in 
the fray, but held whispered communications with 
the secretaries, passing bribes, euphemistically called 
fees, into the hands of one or another. When the 
greed of the underlings was satisfied, one of them 
would whisper to the kadi, who would promptly 
call such and such a case. It seemed to be ordi- 
narily taken for granted that judgment would go 
for the litigant who had bribed highest. But mean- 
time a poor woman on the skirts of the crowd per- 
petually interrupted the proceedings with loud cries 
for justice. She was sternly bidden to be silent, 
and reproachfully told that she came there every 
day. ' And so I will,' she cried out, ' till the kadi 
hears me.' At length, at the end of a suit, the 
judge impatiently demanded, 'What does that 
woman want V Her story was soon told. Her only 
son had been taken for a soldier, and she w r as left 
alone and could not till her piece of ground ; yet 
the tax-gatherer had forced her to pay the impost, 
from which as a lone widow she should be exempt. 
The judge asked her a few questions, and said, ' Let 
her be exempt.' Thus her perseverance was re- 
warded. Had she had money to fee a clerk, she 
might have been excused long before." 

Here we see that the woman was reproached, 
not for her importunity, but for her coming every 
day ; the other suitors were just as importunate, 
each crying out for a hearing, but it was for this 
one day, no evidence appearing that, like the 
woman, they had been coming every day. With 
3 



34 Four Bible Studies. 

her, as with the widow of the parable, it was not 
importunity for one day, but the " continual com- 
ing " that in both cases brought the favourable 
decree. A clear distinction must thus be made in 
the meanings of the two expressions; it is a con- 
clusion altogether unwarranted to say that they 
are of interchangeable application. The main dif- 
ference between the woman in this account and 
the widow of our parable is, that the one was ask- 
ing for what was clearly just, but the other for 
revenge. The judge whom Canon Tristam saw, 
had been delaying justice for the sake of a bribe, 
and yielded to the woman when it turned out that 
she had no bribe to give ; but the judge in our 
parable gave the widow her answer for a more hon- 
est and serious reason. From the soliloquy which 
our Lord puts in his mouth we see the workings 
of his heart; pride and haughtiness were there in 
abundant measure, but no dishonesty ; the words 
in which Jesus makes him open to us his innermost 
thought show that fear of a " black eye " was the 
only but sufficient motive with him for granting 
her revenge. 

Now we have come to the proper application of 
the parable. We who pray are like the widow, 
and are to come and ask, not for justice, but for 
" revenge." There are two passages in the New 
Testament from which we may obtain the ethical 
and spiritual meaning of that word as it relates to 
the subject-matter and to the manner of our pray- 
ers ; for, as it means, when used in its ordinary and 
bad sense, an excessive retaliation of evil in return 
for evil suffered, so, when used, as here, in its good 



ftenenge. 35 

sense it means an excess of good action, an over- 
plus of well-doing. In 2 Cor. x. 6 Paul coin- 
mends the obedience to the Gospel of some and 
condemns the disobedience of others, and declares 
that after the fulfilment of the obedience of the 
faithful ones, the disobedience of those hitherto 
unfaithful shall be " revenged " ; that is, through 
the operation of the spiritual, uncarnal weapons 
brought to bear upon them, all in them that exalts 
itself against the knowledge of God shall be cast 
down, and every thought brought into captivity to 
the obedience of Christ. In 2 Cor. vii. 10 and 11, 
speaking of the effect upon those to whom he was 
writing of that godly sorrow which worketh re- 
pentance unto salvation, the Apostle testifies to the 
carefulness, the clearing of themselves, the indigna- 
tion, fear, desire, zeal, and revenge it wrought in 
them. Here the particular meaning of " revenge " 
is made clear from the text preceding ; the church 
at Corinth had for a season dropped into such laxity 
of discipline as to suffer among them without cor- 
rection or rebuke a most heinous example of evil 
as recorded in 1 Cor. v., and when, under the sting 
of Paul's sharp letter, they had been made con- 
scious of their own sin and had repented, they 
were most eager to repair the wrong, to purify the 
church ; and then, proceeding further than was re- 
quired of them strictly in the case, they made for 
a so much higher spiritual life and for so much 
purer morals as their life and morals before then 
had been low and slack ; and thus their godly sor- 
row had wrought upon them its proper and whole- 
some " revenge." 



36 Four Bible Studies. 

Such, therefore, must be the true tenor of the 
word as applied by our Saviour to the prayers of 
God's elect ; they are to ask for such abundance as 
to quantity, such excellence as to quality, of all the 
good things He has to give, as will be far in excess 
of what, in men's judgment, would be deemed 
reasonable and fair; they are to go beyond justice, 
and ask for revenge. And He can grant it. Bound 
by no consideration whatever as limiting His will 
and power, high above all law (as He is the author 
of all law), high above that realm where what we 
apprehend as causes and effects are in action, " He 
is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that 
we ask or think " ; in all these respects He is like 
the unjust judge. Like him also in another and 
wonderful respect ; for as the judge is compelled 
by the widow, and must comply under peril of 
disgrace and loss, so our gracious God represents 
Himself here as placing at stake His character as 
the hearer and answerer of prayer, and as resting 
upon it His very title to office as our Father and 
God. This thought controls in the application 
by our divine Lord, " He will (or shall) work 
out the avenging of His own elect." He shows 
God as having a certain relation to His people ; 
they are His chosen ones, and therefore, as in all 
other instances where persons or people are spoken 
of as " chosen," there is implied a mutual cove- 
nant. God's elect have duties to perform toward 
Him, and, on the other hand, God has duties to 
perform toward His elect. It is God's side of this 
covenant which our Saviour lays stress upon in 
this application ; He puts it in the strong inter- 



Revenge. 37 

rogative form, " And shall not God work out the 
avenging of His own elect? " as if to say : "How 
preposterous to think that God shall not work out 
the avenging of His own elect ! He shall, and from 
the very fact that He has chosen them." God is 
under constraint and tied up to just such a course 
with His elect; He cannot free Himself from it 
except He cast them off utterly and disown them 
as His elect, something He has never yet done and 
never can do while they are faithful to Him. Our 
Master assuredly intended to emphasize these cove- 
nant relations, as constituting a strong and inde- 
feasible claim upon our Heavenly Father, making 
impossible the refusal of any prayer. This is the 
all-sufficient reason why " men ought always to 
pray and not faint." 

It remains to notice some expressions in the 6th 
and 7th verses. " Hear what the unjust judge 
saith." Our attention is directed, not to what the 
judge does, not to what the widow does or says, 
but only to what the judge says ; he will avenge 
her lest she give him a black eye ; so he declares ; 
he could not suffer her coming any more ; the 
motive for his action is selfish, not dictated by any 
benevolent feeling toward the supplicant ; never- 
theless, the action promptly relieves the widow. 
God is the fountain of love and mercy ; nay, He is 
love itself ; and if He would be God, then He 
must for his own sake and of necessity answer 
prayer ; and, further, all the while that He is work- 
ing out revenge for His chosen, He is also fAanpo- 
Ovjuei (" broad-hearted ") toward them. This word, 
translated " long-suffering " and " having patience " 



38 ' Four Bible Studies. 

in other parts of the New Testament, is not well 
given the right sense here in the English word 
" long-suffering " ; as intended by Luke, the Greek 
word has a meaning different from that conveyed 
by the English word into which it is translated ; it 
is not the true thought that God is bearing with us 
beyond what we ought to expect, that we are, so 
to speak, trespassing on His kindness and good- 
will nearly to the exhaustion of His patience. This 
English double word has been changed in its ap- 
plication since the translation of the Bible two 
hundred and eighty years ago ; then it had a 
meaning purely and singly good, that of kind- 
ness and forbearance without implication of un- 
merited toleration toward a sinful person or sinful 
act ; as used in this parable, therefore, it has 
that singly good meaning, and, in fact, it has 
such in all the other New Testament uses. A 
good example of this is shown in 2 Peter iii. 15 : 
" And account that the long suffering of our Lord 
is salvation " ; the context both before and follow- 
ing this passage shows Peter as addressing, not a 
church that was provoking God by inconsistent 
and blameworthy lives, but a church of those 
chosen ones who were honouring Him u in all holy 
living and godliness." So in 1 Peter iii. 20 ; God's 
plan in waiting one hundred and twenty years 
was full of broad, generous love to the people of 
Noah's time. Maxpos has the meaning of large- 
ness in all directions — broad, deep, long ; dvpios is 
the soul, heart, the emotional nature as contrasted 
on one side with nv£vjj.a, which is the spiritual 
nature, human or divine (Green's N. T. Syno- 



Revenge. 39 

nyms), and on the other side with tyvxv, which 
is the life or soul common to man and irrational 
animals. So that fAaxpo0v/iei 7 thus derived, gives 
a clear perception of the receptive, all-embracing 
kindness and partiality of God toward His chosen, 
and it is the only right word here; by the use of 
any other, such as Lieya\oi/:vxia or ^eyaXo^poavvrf^ 
the real purport would not have been indicated, 
for these were as often employed with a bad mean- 
ing (haughtiness, intolerant pride) as with a good. 
God is great-hearted, broad-souled toward us ; and 
our Master takes pains to affirm this fact lest we 
carry our parallel too far, and make God to be like 
the judge in a spiritual way. We must be careful 
to avoid such error ; the parable deals only with 
the judge's motives and his acts as resulting from 
them ; it does not touch upon his moral qualities, 
nor at any point bring them "into likeness with 
God's attributes. There now follows the assertion, 
twice repeated, that God is and will be working 
out revenge for the elect, crying unto Him day 
and night ; 7toi?)(?6i denotes sustained effort 
(Green), and sustained effort by an omnipotent 
Father must bring an answer speedily. 

The resemblances of the parable having now been 
drawn, we may briefly sum up. Suitors in a court 
of law of our day and in Western lands have certain 
rights and acquire a certain standing there by rea- 
son of their citizenship. These rights are secured 
under common and statute law, and most of them 
are set forth in constitutions and bills of rights; 
by them the humblest citizen is fenced about with 
well-defined safeguards from any oppression, from 



40 Four Bibje Studies. 

hindrance or refusal on the part of the officers of 
the law; and he is always sure of a patient hearing 
and impartial verdict through the just and equita- 
ble procedures in our courts. In contrast to this, 
an Oriental court is and always has been a very 
nest of venality ; quoting again from Doctor Tris- 
tam : " From the dawn of history the venality of 
judges and the miscarriage of justice has been one 
of the chief abominations which have called down 
the indignant remonstrances of prophets and holy 
men. The book of Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, 
prophetical writings, the Gospels themselves, are 
full of denunciation of unrighteous judges. Nor is 
the corruption less notorious throughout the whole 
Eastern world at the present day. A man who, 
like the foully-murdered Midhat Pasha, sternly 
refuses bribes on the judgment seat, is still looked 
upon with wonder and admiration, This character 
of a judge is indeed contrary to our impressions of 
that office as we see it in happier Western lands, 
where public opinion bears strongly on all func- 
tionaries, and Christianity has introduced a high 
standard of rectitude ; but it is still to be seen in 
all its frightful corruption and malignity through- 
out the whole of Asia." The unjust judge of the 
Orient, therefore, is and was of this rapacious and 
sordid character, and was influenced in his decisions 
by one of two considerations : either, and most 
generally, by a bribe, or, as in this case in the 
parable, occasionally by fear of certain evil conse- 
quences to follow upon a refusal of the suitor's ap- 
plication ; in either case no question of right had 
of itself any weight, no plea of justice had any 



Revenge. 41 

force ; the words would be a mockery if applied to 
any procedure there. 

The practice in the prayer court of our Father is 
constituted upon a plan corresponding ethically to 
that of the court of the unjust judge. We have no 
legal standing before Him, we cannot go there with 
birthright citizenship to institute any suit, we have 
no natural bill of rights on which to base any de- 
mand, we have no standing there to sue for what 
is just and equitable ; all pleas advanced on such 
ground are thrown out at once, and God sees noth- 
ing in us or in our pleadings deserving of a mo- 
ment's consideration on the basis of mere justice ; 
before His bar such claims are valueless, and all 
our righteousness is as filthy rags. But once we 
have become His chosen, and thus approach to 
offer our suit on the ground of personal privilege 
and favour, with no plea of merit or desert in the 
case, then we have His ready ear ; He is under the 
bonds of a solemn covenant which He cannot 
break, and under peril of a penalty He must not 
incur, to grant the prayers of His elect, that penalty 
being the demission of His office as the God of our 
love, our obedience and our worship. Thus, under 
the compulsion of His loving relation with us, the 
ability to fulfil, or the advisability of fulfilling our 
prayers, however extravagant, become questions 
of minor importance to our Almighty God, u who 
is able to do exceeding abundantly above " our 
prayers. 

On account of their peculiar significance, and at 
the risk of being repetitious, let us direct attention 
to two or three points already alluded to. Why 



42 Four Bible Studies. 

did our Master employ the verb only in the first 
part of the parable and as spoken by the widow 
and judge, but took the trouble, in His application, 
to say of God, nou)a^i exdiKr/tjiv, using the verb 
and the noun? For surely it was an unnecessary 
trouble if those two words meant no more than 
£K8iKr}<jei y nor can it be said in any w T ise that the 
verb and noun have only a periphrastic use here, 
and are simply equivalent to the one verb. The 
many uses in other parts of the New Testament of 
noi8GQ with a noun directly controvert such view ; 
for there is in them the idea, spiritual or otherwise 
as the case may be, of an active and efficient opera- 
tion. Good examples of this use are afforded in 
Paul's declarations regarding the prayers he was 
offering for those to whom he was writing ; as 
in Kom. i. 9, Eph. i. 16, Phil. i. 4, 1 Thess. i. 2, 
Philem. 4. In these the participle and noun 
together, " making mention," have an intensive 
force far beyond what the participle " mentioning" 
alone would have ; they imply a fixed and continu- 
ing custom, a settled and forceful habit with Paul 
of praying for those he was so diligently instruct- 
ing; yet, in the English translation of this parable 
the verb "avenge" is alone used in all four in- 
stances, and so the grand significance of the con- 
tinuous and persistent " working out " of revenge 
by our Father for His chosen is utterly suppressed 
and put out of sight. 

Again, expositors have always applied SKdiKtjGiS 
as here meaning only 6ixr/ P but a close study of all 
the uses of dim] and diuaios and dinaiovv and 
diKaiGQfjKx, on the one hand, and of euSiueiv and 



Revenge. 43 

ejcShajGis, on the other hand, will show a clear-cut 
difference and distinction in usage in all places 
except two or three where these words occur in 
both New Testament and Septuagint ; Justice and 
Eight are plainly and exclusively indicated by dint}, 
while Revenge and Retribution, without regard to 
any measure or limitation of either, are as clearly 
indicated by endhtrjai^. 

And now, in reviewing, Ave may draw out on 
parallel lines the likenesses of our Heavenly Father 
to the unjust judge : 

The judge was an autocrat. Our Father is all-powerful. fc 

There was no pretence of right No right inheres with us to ask 
in the widow's request. God for anything. 

The widow, because she was a God's chosen stand before Him 
widow, had a peculiar privi- on the ground of privilege 
lege of coming. and favour. 

The judge granted the widow's Our Father grants our prayers 
prayer from fear of conse- under forfeiture of our obedi- 
quences to himself. ence, love, and loyalty. 

The judge could execute his Our Father grants our prayers 
decree forthwith. speedily. 

It is thus plainly apparent that this parable 
deals with no questions of right or justice touch- 
ing our intercourse with God. For if He were only 
just, He w r ould be bound strictly by the ordinary 
laws of moral cause and effect as we understand 
them ; His acts would be circumscribed in scope by 
those laws, just as there are right rules governing 
the acts of a righteous earthly judge in these 
modern times. God never could overstep those 
laws; and we never could ask Him to do so. Fur- 



44 Four Bible Studies. 

thermore, we must always know what it is right 
and just to ask of Him, and that would imply 
either the possession of divine omniscience, or else 
the tacit and offensive assertion that we are rightly 
deserving of what we ask. 

If the lesson of the parable were that God does 
but justly in answer to prayer, then it would need 
to be entirely reconstructed, and should read after 
this manner: "In a certain city there was a judge 
just and upright, fearing God and regarding man ; 
and a widow of that city came to him, saying, 
' Do justice for me against my adversary'; and 
after waiting a while in order to enjoy her en- 
treaties, and also that her trust in his ability and 
good-will might be w r ell developed and strength- 
ened, he did as she wished ; he called the widow 
and her adversary both before him, heard patiently 
both sides of the case, and gave his decision in 
accordance with equity and fairness. In this way 
God answers our prayers; He limits Himself' by 
set rules, and will not go beyond them, and is not 
moved even to do right until after a ' continual 
coming,' after much importunity and clamour. 
Thus do we exercise our faith, and it is such faith 
He expects to find on earth at His coming." 
Such would be the lesson perfectly consistent 
with such a parable ; it fits every way, but it is 
a most absurd misfit when applied to the parable 
of the unjust judge. To obtain it from the latter 
many of the terms must, as we have seen, be per- 
verted or nullified ; one of the characters must be 
misrepresented as asking for what she did not 
want, and the parabolic quality must be destroyed 



Revenge. 45 

in making the application from the other character 
by contrast and not by likeness. 

That so many of the words and phrases of this 
parable should have been thus weakly and inade- 
quately rendered into English, would seem some- 
what strange ; for there are no other such and so 
many instances in all the New Testament within so 
small a space ; and yet it will not appear so unac- 
countable if we keep it in view that the trans- 
lators three hundred years ago would have had in 
mind u importunity " as the lesson conveyed by the 
parable, and that, as predicated upon this, they were 
bound to so render the words into English as that 
they should conform with, or at least be not repug- 
nant to, such a lesson. Of this case, therefore, 
as of the case of avaidia in " The Friend at 
Midnight," it may be said that new meanings for 
the Greek-English lexicon were originated through 
this necessity for confirming or establishing an 
interpretation then and ever since believed to be the 
true one, but which we have now tried to show is 
erroneous ; so that the exegesis was not at all deter- 
mined by the real meanings and tenor of the words 
as employed under Greek usage at the time Luke 
recorded them. 

We come now to the crown and capstone of the 
parable in the momentous question: "Neverthe- 
less, when the Son of Man cometh, shall He find 
faith on the earth ? " It is generally passed by as 
of little moment, or is treated often as a graceful 
round-up of the parable, but nowhere between the 
covers of the Bible has one been placed of more 
solemn import; and its strong significance has 



46 Four Bible Studies. 

been all frittered away and dissipated under the 
weak and watery interpretation of " importunity " ; 
as if the lesson were only " clamour," an indefinite 
continuance in begging, a teasing of God till He 
gets tired and answers merely to get rid of us ; 
as if there was required a certain amount of nois} 7 
entreaty to move Him; as if we were to ding 
our prayers into His ears, and, like the heathen, 
think we will be heard for our much speaking!! 
Far above all such low views, the precious lesson 
summons us to the glorious faith and trust that 
God is ever lovingly near us, so devoted to us 
under the terms of our covenant with Him that He 
can never refuse anything to His chosen, and would 
never if He could. Here do we surely know that 
they who wait on the Lord shall not want any 
good thing. Here is revealed the kind of faith 
that our Lord is in doubt about finding on the 
earth at His coming ; faith in exercising our privi- 
leges as His chosen ; faith in asking extravagantly 
and boundlessly ; faith that He, in thus covenant- 
ing, has deliberately and graciously put from Him- 
self all choice in the case and is compelled to give 
answer ; faith that men will, down through all the 
ages, so put in practice the lesson of this priceless 
parable that they will always pray and not faint. 



PRAYER. 

James v. 16, 17, 18. 

There stands out from the main form of our Old 
Testament Scripture a notable example of success- 
ful prayer, a prayer offered with sincerest desire 
for God's glory and the enthronement of His right- 
eousness in the hearts of erring men, but with most 
mistaken estimate of the right means and method 
for promoting it. The contest between Elijah, the 
clear-hearted, sincere man of God, and Ahab, the 
wicked king of Israel, offers the occasion for an 
interesting study of the subject of prayer. 

The earnest prophet had earnestly prayed God 
to withhold rain and dew until such time as he 
(Elijah) should desire their return. It is not diffi- 
cult to understand the course of reasoning which 
had brought the prophet to this conclusion. After 
the death of good Asa a succession of wicked 
kings sat on the throne, each more vile than his 
predecessor, until the culmination of all infamy had 
come in the persons of Ahab and his heathen wife, 
Jezebel. What was to become of God's chosen 
people if this awful downward course of corruption 
was held ? This was the problem weighing heavily 
on Elijah's heart ; he was very jealous for the Lord 
God of Hosts, and whatever measure human wit 
could devise to arrest this portentous slide into per- 
dition ought to be adopted and put in force at once. 
The disease had fast hold of the people at the very 



48 Four Bible Studies. 

vitals of their spiritual life ; and any remedy, to be 
effective, must be of heroic nature, and be put with 
no delay into heroic practice. It must be one to 
take hold on all the people ; for, through the de- 
grading worship of the vile god Baal and the viler 
goddess Ashtoreth, the people were rapidly sinking 
into the foul pit of a beastly sensuality. Their 
land, so smiling and fruitful everywhere, must be 
stricken ; life must be made hard to them and not 
easy ; the labour of watering the soil for their crops 
must be added to the ordinary work of cultivation ; 
in place of ease and plenty, the earth must yield 
only scanty returns to severe labour; the people 
would then have little or no time for resort to the 
groves or to the House of Baal in Samaria, a place 
abominable for indulgence in the worship and 
licentious rites instituted by Ahab, " whom Jezebel 
his wife stirred up." Such sore affliction would 
also bring the people to better thoughts ; they 
would remember the broken law of their righteous 
God, and would live again under the pure and hal- 
lowing influences of those ceremonial rites insti- 
tuted by Moses and faithfully observed by their 
fathers during many generations. Surely, under 
the weight of so great suffering their souls would 
be softened and penitent, they would forsake their 
wicked wa} r s and seek the Lord Jehovah, and He 
would be favourably entreated of them and would 
turn their hearts back again. So, heedless of any 
personal danger to result from the wrath of Jeze- 
bel, Elijah boldly goes to Ahab and announces the 
commencement of a drought that is to continue as 
long as Elijah shall require. 



Prayer. 49 

But he soon found how sadly he had miscalcu- 
lated the influences of adversity upon such a people 
whom he would save, as it were, in spite of them- 
selves. Misfortunes and hard afflictions have, in 
themselves, no salvatorv power ; they may serve as 
fingers on a guide-post, pointing out the right path 
at the parting of the ways, but still the rebellious 
heart has its own choice of route, and may keep 
straight on in the path to destruction. Under the 
desperate control and counsel of Jezebel, Elijah had 
been singled out by Ahab to be hunted down like 
a wild beast, and all prophets of the Lord whom 
the Obadiahs could not hide and nourish were put 
to the sword. As the drought was prolonged, and 
its bitter effects brought greater suffering, so grew 
the hate of that hardened woman, the real ruler of 
Israel ; and Jehovah's special care was over Elijah, 
to save him from her unceasing search in Samaria 
and neighbouring countries. At length, as three 
and a half years of famine had now prevailed, 
and there were no signs of any change in the 
hearts of the people, no turning away from the 
idols and idol worship they had learned to love, 
the conclusion must have forced itself upon Elijah 
that, after all, this famine policy was a failure ; 
and he began to see that adversity does not of 
itself foster virtuous feelings and resolves ; that 
disaster coming upon men's temporal affairs never 
softens their stubborn wills to make them love sin 
anv the less, or to break the chains that bind them 
to their lusts. On the contrary, he had seen the 
degradation month after month becoming more 

prevalent, so that to all appearance the people 
4 



50 Four Bible Studies. 

were ripe for an utter forsaking of the true God, 
had forgotten the teachings of their fathers and the 
stern lessons of Sodom and Gomorrah, and would 
wholly embrace the idolatry of Baal with all its 
train of abominations. 

In this view, the one thing now to do was to call 
on Jehovah for restoration of the rain ; but, before 
that, he would make a last effort to arrest the 
people's attention, to vindicate the omnipotence 
of God, and to demonstrate beyond question His 
supremacy over Baal ; perhaps, after such demon- 
stration, they might turn and repent, might throw 
off the yoke of wicked Ahab and choose one who 
would rule righteouslv and in the fear of God. So 
we may believe that in prayer to Jehovah he 
spread Jpefore Him the plan of the gathering on 
Carmel, the two altars and the miracle of sacrifice 
by Heaven's fire ; and that God granted his prayer 
and promised performance of His own part in it. 
We need not rehearse the grand but familiar story ; 
the fire fell, the sacrifice was consumed, and then 
the people could not but shout, " The Lord Je- 
hovah, He is the God !" Elijah was weak enough 
(we might say he would have been almost more 
than mortal not) to take advantage of this oppor- 
tune moment for the use of a resistless power thus 
suddenly given. The love of despotism is ingrained 
in the Oriental heart, and the temptation to make 
this a temporal and not a spiritual success was 
altogether too great. " Down to the Kishon with 
these vile prophets of Baal, every one of them ! 
Let their severed heads dam up its waters and 
their blood redden its rushing tide ! " Foolish 



Prayer. 5 1 

man! In place of permitting those four hundred 
to live to become the objects of derision and con- 
tempt, and the name of Baal a byword and 
hissing in every border of Israel, he must needs 
make martyrs of them, and thus give a false glory 
and greater exaltation to that detestable idolatry 
in whose service they had died. 

Thus the good influence of the grand miracle 
was quickly dissipated, and the newly-awakened 
loyalty toward Jehovah was overborne and 
drowned in the savage cries of Jezebel and her 
followers for a full requital of this wanton 
slaughter. The heavy wrath of that infuriate 
woman is now in dire pursuit of Elijah ; he must 
flee in hot haste to a strong and secret place 
among the munitions of rocks in Horeb. There, 
at length, the sad lesson of his mistaken course 
is brought home to him. He had been trying 
to teach the people by famine, by miracle, by 
slaughter ; and now the Lord Jehovah, dealing 
with him after a like manner, would lovingly teach 
a new lesson to His devoted servant through the 
exhibition of certain violences in nature correspond- 
ing to the moral violences Elijah had employed. 
The parable of the earthquake, the tempest, and 
the fire was easy to understand when the Lord 
had, after them, sent the still, small voice. Let us 
now clearly understand the character of Elijah. 
He was large-hearted, but narrow-minded ; he was 
a man of one idea ; while he was wholly consecrate 
and given up in every fibre of his being to the 
service of his Lord, yet with all this entire devo- 
tion he was not of broad mental view, did not 



52 Four Bible Studies. 

take pains to inform himself of all facts and cir- 
cumstances bearing on his work, and, as he thus 
went in ignorance of facts, he was unprepared to 
meet events with that full wisdom and thorough 
dealing possible only to those who are completely 
informed and- have accurate gauge of affairs and 
of the men concerned in them. And if it w^ere not 
irreverent, we might here write that our Heavenly 
Father would appear to have a " weak side " to- 
ward men of this sort ; they endear themselves 
very greatly to Him by their intense devotion and 
earnest faith, while they are also erratic, of narrow 
view, egotistic, and opinionated. Such were David, 
" the man after God's own heart," Peter, Job, and 
others who might be named. 

There in Horeb were the time and place for the 
lesson to be taught Elijah ; the disappointed and 
humiliated man confesses his overthrow ; all he has 
done and all God has done through him has gone 
for nothing ; life is even a burden to him ; he had 
sought to do a grand thing, to turn a whole people 
from sin and idolatry to goodness and true wor- 
ship, and had utterly failed ; he had tried to make 
men good in outward appearance and by outward 
pressure, with no reckoning of those interior and 
spiritual forces under which alone the life can 
be redeemed from corruption. The Lord gently 
calls and asks, " What doest thou here, Elijah ? ' : 
and the ignorant and therefore conceited prophet 
mournfully replies, " I have been very jealous for 
the Lord God of Hosts ; I, even I, only am left." 
Until told by Obadiah, Elijah had not known that 
one hundred prophets were hid away ; nor had he 



Prayer, 53 

tried to find if any were yet left in Israel who had 
not bowed the knee to Baal, whether seven thou- 
sand or seven hundred or seventy or seven; "I, 
even I, only am left, a prophet of the Lord." Ah, 
Elijah, what if, in place of using the lash of famine, 
you had reflected that there might possibly be 
others who yet loved and served Jehovah, had en- 
deavoured to know these hidden ones, had secretly 
visited them, cheered and instructed them, had 
encouraged them with some of the intrepidity of 
your own soul ; thus might the still, small voice of 
the Spirit of God have done His quiet and effective 
work through these upon all the estranged hearts 
of Israel. You could not then have anv the more 
incurred the hate of Jezebel, and God would not any 
the less have protected you from her vengeance ; so 
through the dark time of oppression would have 
been secretly kept and nurtured the nucleus of a 
faithful party that at the opportune moment might 
have overturned the throne of Ahab and set in full 
rule a just and impartial prince. 

" Not try might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, 
saith the Lord of Hosts." Not by famine in 
Samaria, nor by tempest rending the rocks of 
Horeb ; not by sacrificial miracle on Carmel, nor 
by earthquake in the mount of God ; not by slaugh- 
ter at the Kishon, nor by fire crumbling the gra- 
nitic masses of Sinai, is the glorious reign of our 
Jehovah to be established in the souls of men. 
God is in none of these. They are things to terrify, 
but never to convince ; to cower, but never to turn 
back the hearts of the wayward and rebellious. 
The Spirit of All Grace, in all ages freely given, is 



54 Four Bible Studies. 

the mighty and secret force working wider and 
more lasting results than would all the wonders 
and terrors of Carmel and Sinai. Elijah, head- 
strong and ignorant, was impatient of the slow and 
hidden movements of God ; expecting success in 
outward demonstration, he was ever looking for it 
through and in the natural things, seen and tem- 
poral, and taking little thought of the spiritual 
things, unseen and eternal. Yet how God loved 
him through all ! loved him for his pure courage 
and lofty zeal, for his single-hearted loyalty and 
devotion ; loved him so well that at the last He 
would not let him know any pangs of- mortal dis- 
solution, but carried him undying to heaven, and 
in a way Elijah best would like, by a whirlwind 
with horses and chariot of fire. 

Before turning from this aspect of the subject, 
we may express the hope — nay, more, our assur- 
ance — that Elijah, in the better world to which that 
chariot bore him, has broader vision and deeper 
insight into spiritual and heavenly forces than he 
had at Carmel and Horeb. Full proof of this is 
involved in the fact that about nine hundred years 
later God sent him down to the Mount of Trans- 
figuration to cheer and comfort the sorrowing and 
despondent Son of Man ; and as he with Moses 
spake with Him concerning the decease He was to 
accomplish at Jerusalem, it must have been out of 
the experiences of his own earthly life that Elijah 
sought to fortify the human heart of our Saviour, 
and to assure Him that the Spirit of His God 
would watch over and keep Him through all the 
dark and bitter experiences of the coming death, 



Prayer. 55 

never to leave His soul in hell nor suffer His Holy 
One to see corruption. The promise and potency 
of the resurrection life were demonstrated to our 
Lord in the persons of these two men ; and as 
Jesus, " the angel who was with Moses in the bush, 
and with the church in the wilderness," the spirit- 
ual rock of His people, had supplied them in the 
wilderness and afterward with spiritual drink, so 
now these leaders of that people He had so loved 
and nurtured came to call these former things to 
His remembrance, and to assure His heart, op- 
pressed with the heavy task of the world's redemp- 
tion, and ready to doubt His own strength to abide 
the awful issue, that the same God who had raised 
them up w r ould also now raise up His Own Beloved 
Son. Xo one of narrow mind, possessed of igno- 
rance and conceit, with any remnant of earthly 
failings and frailties, could have been selected for 
such momentous mission ; Elijah on the glorious 
mount had none of these ; he had been changed, 
as we (blessed thought) will also, in that day, be 
changed, " in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye." 
Let us now see wherefore and wherein this his- 
tory of Elijah "was written aforetime for our 
learning, that we through patience and comfort of 
the Scriptures might have hope." James has set 
it forth and summed it up in few words: "The 
supplication of a righteous man availeth much in 
its working." Elijah, a man of like passions with 
us, intensely fervent and zealous, but also intensely 
narrow and self-sufficient, prayed God for the 
awful visitation of famine ; he little knew what he 
asked for, nor in how wide-reaching measure the 



56 Four Bible Studies. 

suffering he sought to bring on the guilty followers 
of Baal was to involve the happiness and lives of 
faithful thousands in Israel. He knew not of the 
seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to 
Baal, and so, culpably ignorant, he made the gross 
mistake of invoking misery on those multitudes of 
the innocent and helpless. But God heard the 
prayer of His earnest but ill-judging servant ; He 
sent the famine, yet He cared for and preserved the 
seven thousand faithful ; His arm was not short- 
ened that it could not save them, even while He 
was giving full effect to Elijah's prayer. We 
are not to judge God, and His ability to do, by 
any human standards ; He was able to do for 
His chosen people then as He is to-day for us, 
" above all they could ask or think " ; He could give 
full scope to the operation of Elijah's extravagant 
petition, and yet save harmless the loyal and de- 
voted among the people. The Apostle refers to 
Elijah's prayer as that of a righteous man, not of 
a self-righteous but one righteous before God, 
and declares that such a prayer " availeth much." 
Elijah's prayer resulted in a line of events he did 
not anticipate ; God worked it out in a totally 
different way and for higher ends than those Elijah 
had proposed ; for it stands forth one of the most 
striking episodes in the record of His dealings with 
men, and is one of those eminently " written for 
our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world 
are come" ; so that from it we may safely draw 
the lesson that our prayers, though offered from 
erring hearts, dictated by fallible judgment, and 
expectant of unwarranted results (according to any 



Pray&t. 57 

human estimate), may yet — yes, will — be received 
and answered. Not in any manner, however, to 
vindicate our fallacious thought, nor to make Infi- 
nite Wisdom wait as a servant on our imperfect 
minds and wills; but our All-Seeing God brings 
forth the consummation in His own way and after 
a manner far above our thought. 

Prayer is a gracious boon and a high privilege; 
but it has fallen into a low estate under the teach- 
ing and practice of many in the Christian world ; 
" earnest prayer " is an expression often heard, and 
too often is spoken as if meaning mere repetition 
of the same prayer. The Lord's Prayer is a model 
for brevity, variety, and terseness, and for the all- 
embracing scope of its themes ; from it, as a model, 
may we not learn that repetition or importunity 
about the same things is not needful w^ith nor 
acceptable to our faithful Hearer of prayer? In 
fact, may w r e not, in intercourse with God, act by 
the same plain, clear rules of common sense that 
actuate us in intercourse with our fellow-men? 
Business men make the largest transactions by 
use of the fewest possible w^ords. Two friends 
meet ; an interchange of thought on some subject 
takes place ; it is found that one can render the 
other some pleasant and easy service; it is asked 
for, the promise is given, the service is rendered; 
all this with very few w^ords. In such agreeable 
ways, ever closely bordering on taciturnity, are all 
affairs of our social and business life regulated ; w^e 
understand each other almost intuitively. AVe may 
well consider that God, if our lives are such as to 
endear us to Him, has tow x ard us an understand- 



58 Four Bible Studies. 

* 
ing equally good, and needing as little speaking on 

our part ; surely, it cannot be required of us to go 
over the same thing with Him in our prayers time 
after time. If we were to go to an earthly friend 
repeatedly about something already discussed once 
and agreed upon, would he not soon come to think 
it a sort of persecution, a needless bother, a puerile 
trifling ; and, if continued long, would he not deem 
it an insulting and wanton doubt of his sincerity? 
And why should not the case be so with our 
Heavenly Father, who can understand us and all 
our thoughts long before we utter them ? It should 
be kept in mind that prayer is treated of in this 
paper in its most limited and legitimate meaning, 
as entreaty, supplication ; we may often speak with 
God in secret to tell Him of our loyalty, love, and 
delight in His service ; such intercourse is properly 
to be termed, not prayer, but communion. 

In the summer of the year 1893 there prevailed 
over a certain district in the State of Indiana a long 
and severe drought. Two deacons living in that 
district on farms not far apart, by chance met one 
morning on the highway and began exchanging 
views in regard to the weather and the prospect 
for crops. They agreed that the drought threatened 
their total destruction, that rain must come soon to 
secure even a half crop ; they agreed that only God 
could give It, and, if given, it must be in answer to 
prayer. Remembering that " If two of you shall 
agree as touching anything they shall ask, it shall 
be done for them of My Father who is in heaven," 
they knelt down where they were and offered their 
prayer for the rain to save their own and their 



Prayer. 59 

neighbours' crops. Some months before this, there 
passed over the country a party of prospectors look- 
ing for indications of natural gas ; on the farm of 
one of these deacons appearances on the surface 
seemed to justify a belief in the presence of gas 
below ; so, after an arrangement made with the 
owner in case of their finding it, they brought on 
the machinery, erected a derrick, and sank the well. 
They had bored and driven the pipe by this time 
far down, but no signs had appeared of the gas, 
and at length discouraged, they had given up hope 
and had begun to draw out the pipe ; it was slow 
and tedious work, each successive section coming 
up with a harder pull ; the last length of pipe had 
been reached and fastened to, but the power of the 
engine seemed inadequate to loosen it; one last 
trial was attempted with full pressure of steam, 
when suddenly there came an upward rush of a 
black, foul fluid belching out and far up with an 
energy that overturned the derrick and wrecked 
the machinery. In a few minutes this fountain 
ran clear, and was seen to be pure cold water, 
and it did not cease its outflow night or day. 
As the country for a wide distance around was 
quite or nearly flat, with no actively flowing 
stream to drain it, this water soon covered and 
flooded it, so that the ungodly and infidel neigh- 
bours of these deacons were roundly cursing them 
on account of their prayers ; for this outburst 
of the water took place on the same day and a 
few hours after the deacons had offered up their 
prayer; all farms were under water, and what 
little crop there had seemed a prior promise of 



60 Four Bible Studies. 

was utterly ruined, drowned out before the hole 
could be capped over and the fountain brought 
under control. God does not answer us as we 
ask, nor by the methods we think He ought to ; 
nothing could have been further from the minds 
of those deacons than that kind of response from 
Him ; they had asked for rain to save their crops, 
and a flood had been sent which completely killed 
them. But those deacons will never need to pray 
for rain again ; with irrigating pipes and channels 
laid out from that fountain, the crops will never 
fail for themselves and their children to the re- 
motest generation. 

Lastly, let it be said that our prayers must always 
be offered upon the expressed or tacit condition of 
subjection to God's will. In this regard our Sav- 
iour's prayer in Gethsemane is the one most beauti- 
ful and precious example : " If it be possible, let 
this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not as I will, 
but as Thou wilt." If our Lord had not uttered 
this last sentence, God would doubtless have an- 
swered His prayer and let the cup pass, and thus 
the world's redemption would have been omitted or 
postponed ! The former case, how awful to con- 
template ! and in the latter case, to what year or 
day the redemption would have been postponed, 
what mortal tongue may tell ? 

Finally, what ample warrant, what complete as- 
surance have we for using this privilege in fullest 
measure, to pray without ceasing, to pray and not 
faint ! Do we stop to require further evidence 
against our doubts on this score? Even that un- 
reasonable demand may be satisfied. In the 5th 



Prayer. 61 

and 8th chapters of Revelations, containing the 
records of one of the visions wherein John saw 
many themes of the church on earth illustrated by 
themes of the church above, one scene is portrayed 
where the throne of The Most High was set, where 
those four living creatures and four and twenty 
elders whom God loved best stood nearest to Him 
and worshipped, offering from golden harps in one 
hand the songs of the redeemed, and out of golden 
bowls in the other hand the sweet-odoured 
prayers of the saints. Rev. v. 8 : " And when he 
had taken the book, the four living creatures and 
the four and twenty elders fell down before the 
Lamb, having each one a harp, and golden bowls 
full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints." 
Rev. viii. 3 and 4 : " And another angel came 
and stood over the altar, having a golden censer ; 
and there was given unto him much incense, that 
he should add it unto the prayers of all the saints 
upon the golden altar which was before the throne. 
And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of 
the saints, went up* before God out of the angel's 
hand." 

So may we be persuaded that the incense most 
pleasing and delightful to Him of all that can be 
offered in heaven or in earth are the prayers of all 
saints ; weak as they may be in expression, poor in 
subject-matter, dictated by erring or foolish motive, 
lacking in faith, feeble in desire, yet they are pre- 
ciously cherished and gathered in those golden bowls 
for God. Around the throne of the King of Kings 
there mav be manv shining hosts who, with sweet- 
toned harps and sweetest voices, pour forth their 



62 Four Bible Studies. 

anthems of praise and love ; yet the prayer uttered 
in trembling whisper by the lowliest saint of earth 
goes past their serried ranks to have instant audience 
in the ear of Heavenly Power, not one feeble tone 
of it muffled by the resounding chants of celestial 
choirs ; that prayer comes in all its freshness, of- 
fered in all its tenderness, as delightful incense to 
Him who " will look to him that is poor and of 
a contrite spirit, and that trembleth at His word. 53 
The coming of God's kingdom waits upon 
prayer; He made it to be so when He bid us pray, 
" Thy kingdom come " ; if there is apparent delay 
in that coming, the fault is ours, not His ; for He 
is not slack concerning any of His promises. Our 
prayers may ascend without measure, freely chal- 
lenging His ability and will to execute them, until, 
through prayer and work, the earth shall be full of 
the knowledge of the Lord, until His name shall be 
great among the heathen, and from every place be- 
tween the rising and the setting sun the priceless 
incense of prayer, so loved by Him, shall rise to fill 
the golden bowls. And whetfier the gladness and 
triumph of His coming be near at hand or very far 
off, may we all, in the one church of heaven and 
earth, whether yet in the battle or gone to our rest, 
be able to stand up boldly and in good confidence, 
and not be ashamed before Him at His coming, 
while He shall then make of Himself the solemn 
inquiry: " Do I find faith on the earth % " 



FIDELITY. 

Luke xvi. 1-13. 

The lesson of the parable, according to the inter- 
pretation generally received, is said to be contained 
in the 9th verse : " And I say unto you, Make to 
yourselves friends by means of the mammon of 
unrighteousness; that when it shall fail, they may 
receive you into the eternal tabernacles." The ap- 
plication is, that the possessors of money or wealth 
should make such wise, liberal, and beneficent use 
of their means as will commend them to those with 
whom they are to be associated in the life here- 
after, when they are to inhabit the "eternal taber- 
nacles." The best disposition for our riches is not 
to hoard, but wisely to spend them ; not to lay 
them up on earth where moth and thieves may de- 
stroy and steal; not to pull down old barns and 
build new for an increasing store, when the morrow 
may not find our souls among the living. Wealth 
is harder to keep than to gain, for it is ever ready 
to " take to itself wings and fly away as the eagle 
toward heaven." Give out, therefore, of your 
riches, exercising a wise beneficence ; so you will 
gain the praise and solid good-will of the good, the 
loving, and lovable in the better life to come. Such 
is the lesson conveyed by the parable according to 
the prevalent exegesis. 

But this seems to be but a small outcome from 



64 Four Bible Studies. 

the great amount of material provided in the eight 
preceding verses. The acts and words of a rich 
landlord, of a dishonest steward, and of the debtors 
conspiring with the steward to cheat the landlord, 
all are said to work out the sole lesson, u Make to 
yourselves friends," etc. Here is a cumbrous and 
useless apparatus provided, as it would seem, for a 
small result; according to the received interpreta- 
tion, the record of the steward's unthrift is given 
in order that men might learn from it to be wise 
and careful in regard to their eternal interests ; 
and the story of dishonesty is narrated in order 
that "sons of light" may know how, with the 
mammon of unrighteousness, to make fit friends 
for society in that heavenly kingdom where earth 
and all its fashions have forever passed away. It 
is all seemingly so unnecessary, this array of land- 
lord, steward, and debtors, to teach the need or 
desirability of securing friends for companionship 
in the better life ; and it is all so illogical that out 
of the unfaithfulness, dishonesty, and recklessness 
of them all should come to us a lesson for using our 
wealth in gaining friends to "receive" us into the 
sinless and glorified state of the redeemed. 

If the lesson is simply, The right use of wealth, 
it could have been inculcated with much less pro- 
fusion of material ; what need to put a steward in 
the story at all ? or what need of a dishonest one? 
why not have simply set forth the rich landlord as 
himself disposing of his wealth so as to do the most 
good with it, as the rich fool is set forth in hoard- 
ing his, and thus win the praise and esteem of the 
faithful and worthy friends whose friendship is to 



Fidelity. 65 

be eternal? He might have been presented in the 
parable modelled after that good rich man Job, 
who could say of himself and of the days of his 
prosperity, u I washed my steps with butter, and 
the rock poured me out rivers of oil." " I delivered 
the poor that cried, and the fatherless and him 
that had none to help him ; the blessing of him 
that was ready to perish came upon me, and I 
caused the widow's heart to sing for joy." " I 
was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. 
I was a father to the poor, and the cause which I 
knew not I searched out." Surelv, the lesson 
from a parable so constructed would come with far 
greater directness and force through the acts of an 
honest and benevolent Dives, than it could by this 
roundabout course through the l} T ing and theft of 
a faithless servant. There is too much machinery 
in the parable for such a simple result ; if the 
builder of a marine engine, in place of coupling the 
crank-rods of the driving pistons directly to the 
shaft (as is the universal custom), Tvere to connect 
them to a series of cog-wheels arranged between 
the crank-rod and the shaft, every one would con- 
demn him for the employment of material which 
served no good use, but vras a needless encumbrance 
upon the motive power. So, by the current and in- 
sufficient exegesis of this parable, there are made 
to appear more " working parts " than are required 
for the single lesson given. 

It was a besetting weakness in the schools of 
Jewish divines and expositors to elaborate each 
insignificant item of a precept or parable, to exag- 
gerate in many parts by an overstrained and hypo- 
5 



fifi Four Bible Studies. 

thetical rendering of terms; but the very opposite 
of this is to be said regarding the prevalent inter- 
pretation of this parable. Here is much matter left 
totally unused ; the steward and the debtors are 
not, as we may believe, necessary actors, and their 
characters are most inappropriate for the lesson 
said to be taught. While, therefore, we may be 
certain that the Divine Teacher brought in these 
characters and made them perform these acts for a 
good, moral purpose and to teach a thorough moral 
lesson, we may be equally certain that He did not 
set them forth as offering the least semblance of a 
model for imitation in our own spiritual life and 
experience. We would now propose a better 
exegesis. 

The parable is to be regarded as in three parts : 
the main part being the verses 1-7 inclusive, and 
the lesson of these seven is contained in verses 10, 
11, and 12 ; the secondary part is in verse 8, w^ith 
its lesson in verse 9 ; while another and third part 
is the summing up and conclusion of all in verse 13. 
The secondary portion will be first treated of, and 
verses 8 and 9 which compose it read thus : " And 
his lord commended the unrighteous steward be- 
cause he had done wisely ; for the sons of this 
world are for their own generation wiser than the 
sons of the light. And I say unto you, Make to 
yourselves friends by means of the mammon of 
unrighteousness ; that, when it shall fail, they may 
receive you into the eternal tabernacles." It has 
already been seen what, under the ruling exegesis, 
has been accepted as the teaching of this latter, the 
9th verse, but one is struck at once with the badly 



Fidelity, 0>7 

disjointed relations such a lesson bears toward all 
the other teachings having reference to eschatol- 
ogy in the New Testament. That kingdom of our 
Redeemer which is altogether spiritual in its course 
from the first dawn of heavenly life in the soul 
until its final consummation and triumph in the 
peace and sinlessness of heaven, that kingdom, if 
we read this interpretation aright, may yet, in a 
manner, be purchased by our use of the money we 
possess. We are counselled to regard this verse as 
containing a command upon us to secure by our 
money these friends wiio are to receive us on our 
arrival in the better world. But who are the 
" friends " ? If they have power to receive, they 
then must have impliedly the powder to reject us ; 
and, in the former case, our salvation depends not 
upon a Saviour, but upon those whom we have in 
this manner made our friends. 

Attention is also called to the usage of the Greek 
word SeSaovTai, a deponent verb translated " re- 
ceive." It is believed that careful study of the 
Greek will show that whenever in the New Testa- 
ment it is applied to persons, there is always im- 
plied, either by the context or by the character or 
function of the person receiving, his privilege of 
choice, to receive or not to receive ; familiar in- 
stances are such as: " He that receiveth you re- 
ceiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him 
that sent me " ; " And whosoever shall not receive 
you nor hear your words," etc. ; as Jesus once 
came to a village of the Samaritans, " they received 
him not, because his face was as though he were 
going to Jerusalem. 5 ' According to this usage, 



68 Four Bible Studies. 

therefore, in every other place where applied to 
persons, the inference cannot fairly be avoided 
that the " friends " in this parable are endowed 
with choice, and thus with power not to receive as 
well as receive into the " eternal tabernacles " ; 
and no further word is needed here to show the 
absurdity as well as the impiety of such a doctrine 
so opposed to our teaching of the Christian belief 
regarding the future life. Aexojuai is, in New 
Testament usage, strongly contrasted with Aocja- 
fiavGo; the former is always conditional in mean- 
ing, and is far from conveying any idea of a defined 
and determinative process or of a fixed, unalterable 
conclusion in the mind of the agent of w x hom or of 
whose acts the verb may be used. But Aa^f3avGD y 
on the other hand, is employed in all cases where 
an ordered and positive action is taken as the re- 
sult of mature experience or settled counsel. But, 
again, of w r hat sort are the friends ? such as we 
might choose, from all we know, to make them 
friendly by the use of money ? Certainly, under 
any interpretative method, we must reject the idea 
of anything in the nature of personal purchase or 
bribery being intended. The thought is, that the 
" mammon " must be used in such unselfish, such 
wisely good and beneficent ways as that we shall 
gain the approval and high praise of all those un- 
selfish, good, and benevolent who are to meet us 
in the blessed hereafter; so say the commentators 
generally accepted as authorities on the parables. 
But there arise great difficulties here. If the 
friends are to receive us, they are to go before us, 
and be on hand at our coming ; are we therefore to 



Fidelity. 69 

make friends only of those advanced in years, and 
who generally would be most likely to await us 
there? How can we help making friends among 
the young as well as the old ? nay, how avoid mak- 
ing friends even among bad men and hardened sin- 
ners ? It is easily conceivable that a faithful Chris- 
tian, faithfully administering the monetary trust 
committed to him as the steward of his Lord, may 
win friends even among the vicious, the worldly, 
the abandoned in sin ; the benevolent are numerous 
in our day ; the Peabodys, Dodges, and Coopers are 
representatives of an increasing class, and their 
" friends " are to be reckoned by the thousands in 
every grade and station of life ; even the degraded 
and basest have no other than words of praise for the 
careful and liberal benefactions made by such men. 
And we may not deny that goodness, apart from 
wealth, often commands the respect and commenda- 
tion of the wicked ; the homage that vice pays to 
virtue is often given in the warm approval and 
high praise of those who have enough of moral 
judgment to appreciate the holy beauty of virtu- 
ous actions, but not enough of moral power or will 
to imitate them. Surely, no one could wish to be 
" received " by that class of friends hereafter, for 
that reception must be only in eternal tabernacles 
suited to the character of their wicked occupants 
and utterly unsuited to the children of light. But 
if it be said that we may make friends only among 
the good, those whom we know as certain to be in 
the better and holier world, then how are we to 
know them ? Their inner life is not open to us ; only 
the Lord knoweththem that are His; the kingdom 



To Four Bible Studies. 

of God cometh not with observation ; we are not 
omniscient, as we should be if we can say of this or 
that one, He must be made our friend, because he 
certainly is to await us in the eternal tabernacles of 
the good and holy. Yet one of the ablest of our 
living divines would persuade us of our duty and 
care specially to select our friends from among the 
good only, and cultivate their friendship so dili- 
gently by the use of our money that they shall " re- 
ceive " us hereafter. The logic of this reasoning is 
all incurably lame in its progress, and phenomenally 
weak in outcome. Our Lord could not have in- 
tended so impotent a conclusion for this parable, 
nor would He have brought all the characters into 
it and filled it so full of action, only to have drawn 
from it teaching so vague and dilute in quality. 

Having thus noted the objections to the current 
and defective explanation of this passage, let us 
turn to what is believed to be a better and sound 
solution. These 8th and 9th verses offer only a 
secondary or side lesson. After the words of the 
7th verse have been spoken our Teacher pauses 
before giving the application contained in the 10th, 
11th, and 12th verses, and fixing the attention of 
His hearers upon the last official act of the steward, 
makes it the occasion for a lesson to the sons of 
light, prefacing it with the expression, " And I say 
unto you." There is no particular stress to be laid 
on these words here ; there is no special emphasis 
to be attached to them, as there should be if pre- 
ceded by the " Verily, verily" He used at other 
times ; but He utters this expression to call off 
attention for the moment from the steward, the 



Fidelity. 71 

landlord, the debtors, and the sons of this world, 
and fix the thoughts of His hearers upon this les- 
son to be drawn from a minor subject, aside from 
the main topic, but naturally suggested by it. It 
was as if He had said in the terms familiar to us 
in modern speech, " By the way, while on this 
subject, and before applying ray parable, let me 
say to you, sons of light, be like sons of this world 
in making friends by means of the mammon of 
unrighteousness ; for as sons of light you can 
wisely do with your own in an honest way what 
the sons of this world do with what is not their 
own in a dishonest and selfish way." The teaching 
of these two verses has therefore reference to the 
making of friends in and for this life only, and not 
with regard to the future life. 

One beneficent result of the Universalist contro- 
versy has been to demonstrate it as true that the 
validity of the doctrine of endless punishment is 
not to be established by the meaning of one cer- 
tain word in our Greek Testament. The word 
aicovios does in the greater number of its uses, yet 
does not always and everywhere, convey the idea 
of limitless duration ; and whether it shall have 
the meaning " eternal " or " everlasting,-' or shall 
mean a period limited and less than these words 
imply, depends entirely upon the connection in 
which it is used. There are many passages in the 
New Testament establishing the possibility or cer- 
tainty of eternal loss for a human soul just as 
conclusively as those passages in which the Greek 
aiGQvws is used, and they might be quoted here 
were it not aside from our present purpose. That 



72 Four Bible Studies. 

word, as used here, does not signify endless dura- 
tion ; for in the connection with other words of 
the sentence it has simply its original and primary 
meaning, " Life-Long." * In primitive usage it 
meant " pertaining to the history of a tribe during 
its successive generations " ; it implied a deter- 
minate measure of existence for either an indi- 
vidual or a generation, which might have been 
extended, but not limitless. In our Saviour's day 
it was used in both its limited and unlimited sense, 
and we are therefore at liberty to construct a lesson 
from His teaching in this instance upon either 
meaning of the word ; but as it has been shown 
impossible for reference to a future life to be here 

* This paper was written and completed early in the winter 
of 1895-6. In the North American Review for April, 1896, the 
following passage appears in the course of a long and ably 
written article by Mr. Gladstone : 

We first become acquainted not witli aionios, but with aion, 
so far back as in Homer. It is used eight times in the " Iliad " 
and five in the "Odyssey" ; most commonly, it is the simple 
equivalent of the Latin "vita" and the English "life," rela- 
tive to a man. Occasionally, it means the heart or flower of 
life, especially in the address of Andromache to the dead 
Hector : avep, dit dtoovo^ veoS dyneod. Here the effect of 
aioovoS is that Hector (who was undoubtedly in his prime) is 
cut away not only from life, but from the flower of life. The 
clause in Psalm cii. 22, comes near it — " Take me not away in 
the midst of my days." 

We come next in classical Greek to the adjective aionios. 
But the Homeric use of the word shows vividly that the word is 
essentially relative rather than absolute. It is the aion of 
somebody or something ; not abstract, not an exact counter- 
part of mors or of the English '"death." With lapse of time 
comes a modification of the sense ; and the meanings are given 
for it, lasting for an age, perpetual, everlasting, eternal. In 



Fidelity. 73 

intended, it follows that the precept of Jesus refers 
solely to the making of friends during and for our 
present earthly life. 

In fact, the word " eternal " is often used at this 
present time and in our English forms of speech 
with limited and restricted meaning. We speak 
(for illustration) of the eternal mountains and the 
everlasting hills ; yet we know it as a literal fact 
that they are not to endlessly endure, since in 
belief of the Divine Word we know that the earth 
is one day to be wrapped up and destroyed in 
universal fire. How easily and suddenly that 
great day of God may be brought on can be very 
readily perceived when we understand a certain 

the Nomoi of Plato, the Maker forms the human being to be 
dvaoXsBpov . . . a A A' ovu aiaoviov, ipvxrfv xai daojua, 
HaQiX7t£p 61 xard rouov ovte$ Oeoi, where the distinctions 
seem to be taken between survival and immortality ; our soul 
survives the death we know of, but death never comes at all to 
the acknowledged gods, who have an indefectible existence. 
But I have not seen in classical Greek any use of either the 
adjective or the substantive for eternity in the abstract, if we 
take the distinction between an expanse of time, to which no 
particular limit is attached, and a substantive eternity, con- 
sisting of time ceaselessly prolonged. Mr. De Quincey, who 
was both scholar and philosopher, has written a paper on this 
word, and he says, apparently with much truth : " The exact 
amount of the duration expressed by our aeon depends alto- 
gether upon the particular subject which yields the aeon." It 
is "the duration or cycle of existence which belongs to any 
object . . . in right of its genus." (Hogg's " De Quincey 
and His Friends," pp. 308, 312.) An approximate rendering of 
the word aionios is perhaps to be found in "life-long." If this 
be the sense of Scripture, then the phrase as used in the parable 
of Matthew xxv. simply throws us back upon the question — 
What is the ordained life of the soul ? 



^4 Four Bible Studies. 

fact well established as such in the views of our 
advanced scientists. The element of oxygen, sup- 
porter of all forms of life, is also the producer and 
supporter of fire, that great enemy of all earthly 
life; and it is the one enormously abundant and 
pervading element of earth and air. With but very 
few exceptions, and in proportions varying with 
each, it enters into every constituent of this globe ; 
it is present in all minerals, earths, waters, in 
every form of animal and vegetable life ; it com- 
bines with every other element in ratios undeviat- 
ing with each particular one. Yet, to say that 
these proportions are regulated by natural laws 
is only the same as to say that they are so fixed 
by the power of Him at whose fiat those laws 
were at first ordained, and " without Whom was 
not anything made that was made " ; and they 
continue in force only by authority of the same 
divine Son of God, Who is ever " upholding all 
things by the word of His power." Let that 
divine upholding cease for an instant, and, by a 
new fiat from our Enthroned Saviour, let new pro- 
portions be given for the combination of oxygen 
with all other substances, and, in most cases, but 
little in excess of those ratios now in force, and we 
can see how quickly the great cataclysm would 
come, " when the heavens being on fire shall be 
dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent 
heat, and the earth and the works that are therein 
shall be burned up." Then would continents, seas, 
forests, mountains, and rivers be no more ; for 
under this renovation by fire we, the beneficiaries 
of His promises, would " look for new heavens and 



Fidelity. 75 

new earth, a dwelling-place for righteousness." 
The word "eternal" had often a limited mean- 
ing also in the Hebrew tongue. The Psalmist 
sings of the heavens and the earth, that u the Lord 
hath made them fast for ever and ever, and hath 
given them a decree which shall not pass " ; yet 
other passages in the Psalms and Prophets declare 
that the mountains shall depart and the hills be 
removed, and that the earth and heavens shall 
wax old and be changed as a vesture, while God 
shall be the same and His years shall have no end. 
Thus do we of this day use the word " eternal " in 
a figurative rather than in its literal sense, and in 
like manner it was here employed by our Lord to 
designate the tabernacles, not as the ever-enduring 
and transmundane abodes of the righteous, but as 
the homes and dwelling-places of this earth. 

There is also a peculiar fitness in the use of 
the term aiaovios as applied to the GHrjras $ this 
will appear from the short study now to be made 
of this latter term, together with oikovs, in the 
4th verse. Ozkos, while often applied to mean 
a constructed dwelling, yet does in its most numer- 
ous applications denote the members of a house- 
hold collectively, and that whether they are of one 
generation or several. Joseph went with Mary to 
Bethlehem to be taxed because he was of the 
oiuos and lineage of David (Luke ii. 4). Owia 
has reference, in all but one of its uses in the New 
Testament, to the material construction serving as 
an abode for the several occupants constituting the 
oiuos. The steward, therefore, in anticipation of 
the results of what he was about to do, had it in view 



76 Four Bible Studies. 

to be received into the oihovs, rather than into the 
oixias ; that is, he would gain the cordial good- 
will of those in authority over the dwellings, know- 
ing that then entertainment must necessarily fol- 
low and be secured to him, in common with all 
other inmates of the oikos. Thus the steward, a 
son of this world, dealing with the debtors, also 
sons of this world, and with no thought other than 
the sordid one of securing himself during this life 
against beggary and starvation, employs the term 
in ordinary use, ohiovs, to indicate the full extent 
to which his expectations of a comfortable and 
easy future have reached. But in contrast to 
these sons of this world, when we come to the 
9th verse, our Lord speaks not of oikovs, but 
of Gur/vds, a word indicating originally booths 
or temporary shelters of boughs; then it was ap- 
plied to tents or tabernacles, but these were also 
of a movable character. Peter on the Mount of 
Transfiguration proposed to build three tabernacles 
there, something easily and quickly done with 
branches from the forests near at hand. In the 
arrangements of the Attic theatre the word (jur/vi} 
originally denoted the booth to which the actor 
retired between his performances ; afterward it was 
applied at successive periods to (1) the stage build- 
ings as a whole, (2) the wall at the back of the 
stage, (3) the decoration or painted scenery in 
front of the back wall, (4) the stage, and (5) the 
theatre in a general sense ; but in the first century 
of the Christian era it had not received any of 
these five latter applications. 

Our Lord therefore could have used the word 



Fidelity. 77 

strictly and only in its original meaning, and very 
appropriately too, for He was not speaking to sons 
of this world, but to the sons of light ; and for 
these latter no habitation of this world should ever 
be aught more than a Gxrfvrf, never an oikoS. 
Having here no continuing city, but seeking one 
to come, their earthly dwelling-place, however sub- 
stantially constructed, must be for them only a 
aKijvi]. The only oinos of enduring value or per- 
manence was that of His Heavenly Father, in 
which were the mansions (novas : from juivGo) that 
He would prepare, and which would remain theirs 
forever. In the light of this use of the word 
(DKtjvas it is seen how appropriately the adjective 
aiooviovs is prefixed, not as having the meaning 
" eternal," but as simply derived from and of 
cognate signification with the noun aioovos in the 
8th verse. It is in speaking of aloovos tovtov, 
of this world, that the sons of light are to regard 
the aiGovwvs (jnrjvas, the life-long, perishable, 
worldly tabernacles, as their only fit and fleeting 
habitations. They have no ozhos here other than 
the oiuob of this perishing aiirjvr}^ and when that 
shall be dissolved they are to have an oikoSojxt] 
of God, an oikia not made with hands (2 Cor. pi-)- 
Thus did this topical use of aiGoviovs easily suggest 
itself to our Divine Teacher as naturally following: 
upon the use of aioovos, both noun and adjective? 
having the same reference. Other cases occur 
where our Lord used a word cognate in meaning 
as well as in form with one He had just before 
uttered, thus : " Thou art rterpos, and upon this 
rtirpa I will build my church." 



78 Four Bible Studies. 

In this view a simple solution is given of the 
parable, and a plain application of this secondary 
lesson. We are so to use all advantages afforded 
us by the mammon of unrighteousness in every 
good way, for every wise and righteous end, that, 
during our time of prosperity such friends shall be 
made as shall be in sympathy with our good acts, 
our good character, our earnest purpose to glorify 
the Lord whose stewards we are ; thus, when our 
riches take to themselves wings and fly away, there 
will be friends remaining gladly willing to care for 
and " receive " us into their houses. What the cor- 
rupt and dishonest steward, a son of this world, 
did for himself in a wretchedly dishonest way, we, 
the sons of light, walking and doing always as sons 
of light, are to do with pure hearts in an honest 
way and with no thought of self and with no sel- 
fish purpose. That divine altruism which leads us 
ever to " look not every man on his own things, 
but every man also on the things of others," and 
is itself a faithful reflection of the Divine Love, 
will soon win its way to appreciative hearts of the 
unselfish and good, and so their friendship is sure 
to be ours in the time of adversity. This is a pre- 
cept spoken, like some others by our Lord, for our 
profit in a material sense, and to serve for our 
advantage in this earthly life ; it recalls one similar, 
spoken in the Sermon on the Plain : " Give, and 
it shall be given unto you ; good measure, pressed 
down, shaken together, running over, shall they 
give into your bosom. For with what measure ye 
mete it shall be measured to you again." The 
precept is general, not special, in application. 



Fidelity. 79 

"Give" is a general command, and the return is 
also to be general ; it shall be given you. Gener- 
ous conduct and a gracious manner of life will win 
men without self-seeking on our part. "What can 
I do for you? " is the question very commonly and 
not unmeaningly heard in our day when two friends 
meet, each appreciating the other, and by this ques- 
tion offering a tribute of regard for his honour- 
able and generous disposition. Such is the very 
practical lesson taught in these two verses ; friends 
thus made through our fidelity in the use of mam- 
mon will "receive " us willingly, lovingly into their 
houses when that mammon shall fail, and to us 
the experience of the Psalmist will be verified, " I 
have been young and now am old, yet never saw I 
the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging their 
bread." 

The solution of the parable is thus made easy by 
the right rendering of one word ; for, under the 
supposed necessity of attaching a meaning of un- 
limited duration to the term aiaovios, the exegesis 
has been of a distorted, unnatural, and inconclusive 
character ; while, with the interpretation here pro- 
posed, all appearances of distortion and unsym- 
metry pass away, and the whole parable, with its 
main lesson, its secondary or side lesson, and its 
concluding application, offers a didactic result 
entirely consistent, harmonious, and natural. It 
also establishes the Greek syntax as correct, and 
the forms of the words orav and inking and 
SeSoorrai as right and properly expressive of the 
thought ; the mammon we possess may or may not 
fail in this life, as the adverb and the verb signify ; 



80 Four Bible Studies. 

and the friends may or may not receive us into 
their houses, as the verb dex°M ai by usage implies, 
and properly makes that reception conditional as 
depending upon the good-will and kindness of 
friends. 

And now may be taken up the main lesson, 
which, under this new exposition and separate 
solution of the 8th and 9th verses, becomes quite 
clear in its reasoning and results. A rich landlord, 
a negligent and eventually dishonest steward, and 
debtors conspiring to cheat a creditor, these are the 
persons in the parable ; but the principal interest 
centres in the steward, who begins with wasting 
only, but ends with theft ; for that is the right 
name for his act, even if technically and legally he 
was not to be held guilty, and did not actually 
appropriate any goods for himself ; for if he had 
stolen anything, the course was at once open to his 
lord to recover the property, prove the theft, and 
then deliver him to the officer for imprisonment or 
crucifixion. Thus the steward, beginning with a 
little negligence and relaxing just a little in the 
care and oversight he should have exercised in his 
office, has passed from each degree of laxity to the 
next worse degree, until the shameful report of 
him, now great in volume, comes to the ear of his 
lord. Unprepared for the sudden arraignment, 
when he comes to consider the answer to his own 
question, " What shall I do ? " he finds that his 
easy life of negligence and unthrift has unfitted 
him for earning an honest living ; physically, he is 
from weakness of body unable to dig ; morally, he 
is from pride unable to beg. 



Fidelity. 81 

He had dallied along that indefinite line where 
a little cessation from watchfulness and care had 
become the imperceptible beginning of unfaith- 
fulness to his lord ; until now, confirmed in habits 
of sloth and carelessness, he can find no way to 
provide against want for the future, except by com- 
mitting some essentially dishonest practices. It had 
therefore become easy for him, and would but little 
disturb his dulled conscience, to conspire in defraud- 
ing the lord in such a manner as to lay the debtors 
under obligation to him for the immense advan- 
tages they would gain by the fraud ; for he w r as 
yet steward, w r ith complete control of affairs, hav- 
ing the same autocratic and unassailable right over 
them that the principal himself would have. And 
now his lord having come at a time w T hen he 
looked not for him, and at an hour when he was 
not aware, to require the account of his steward- 
ship, and with every avenue to an honest living 
closed against him through his own fault, his only 
recourse is in connivance at wholesale plunder for 
the sake of obtaining a livelihood ; and his fate at 
last is to be a pensioner by sufferance upon the 
debtors whom, by a rascally act in common with 
them, he has benefited. The parable deals no fur- 
ther with these debtors, but in us who read it there 
arises a strong curiosity (supposing this had been a 
real history) to know how it would have turned out 
at last with the steward ; whether he would have 
continued to the end of his life to enjoy the fruits 
of his rascality, or whether the benefits gained by 
the. debtors through those swindles, having become 
exhausted (or even if not exhausted during the 
6 



82 Four Bible Studies. 

steward's lifetime), they turned him out in the 
street to end his days at last in beggary. Unprin- 
cipled men, making gain by such sordid methods, are 
apt to figure closely and act with just as little honour 
toward the poor tool through whom they received 
thv. gain as they have acted toward his principal. 

There was no long interval between the steward's 
" "What shall I do ? " and his " I am resolved what 
to do." That " logic of events," which in modern 
times has been made the occasion and excuse for 
many unrighteous acts by all sorts and conditions 
of men, was in this steward's case altogether of 
convincing and resistless force. The plea made by 
many a modern thief and tramp, " A man must 
live, and the world owes me a living," is the same 
in effect as that used by the steward, " that they 
may receive me into their houses." So was he at 
the last unrighteous in much, as he had been at the 
first unfaithful in the least. The lesson of this 
main part of the parable has now become plain : 
Whoso sets his heart only on the things of this life, 
is always looking out for self, is concerned only 
about having a good and easy time ; he must, in 
the end, turn out either a rascal or a be^ar : the 
unselfish prosper because they make friends by 
constant and consistent practice of unselfishness; 
the selfish come to disgrace or want because by 
ungenerous practices they have alienated and re- 
pelled those who would have always been their 
friends, and in time of adversity their helpers. 
Thus is selfishness the root and origin of unfaith- 
fulness, and in this short statement may be com- 
prised the whole history of the steward. 



Fidelity. 83 

Nor is the rich landlord a very admirable char- 
acter. True, he was of open disposition and gener- 
ous ; he still treated the steward kindly after the 
evil report was come, gave him space to clear him- 
self if he could, and, pending that, kept him still in 
office, apparently on the principle that he should 
be held as innocent until properly proved to be 
guilty ; yet he shows himself to be a son of this 
world, for the villainy being accomplished, he has 
no word of regret over the result; chagrin and 
anger are repressed, and in sympathy with the con- 
scienceless spirit of the money-grabbing sons of the 
world, he has only w r ords of admiration for the ex- 
ceeding acuteness and adroitness of the rascal who, 
in betrayal of his trust, has made for him so great 
a loss. We can imagine the rich man ending his 
contemplation of the case by repeating to himself 
a phrase closely akin to that idiotic saying so com- 
mon in this day, prominent in popular literature 
and of frequent use in the conversation of reckless 
and selfish men, " Nothing succeeds like success." 

There is a law of fidelity in the kingdom of 
God ; and of all methods for testing character and 
showing the true fibre and temper of a man's soul, 
his acts and ways in regard to the mammon of un- 
righteousness offer the most keen and searching, 
for the temptations are of the strongest and most 
subtle sort. Consider what this mammon really is 
in the ultimate analysis. If it had been made a 
law of our physical and moral nature that no man 
should 'ever be able to earn by his labour more 
than would suffice for shelter, clothes, and food, 
there never would have been in use in any Ian- 



84 Four Bible Studies. 

guage such terms as wealth, capital, savings, 
treasure, temples, banks, railroads ; for the objects 
represented by these terms would have no exist- 
ence. But the law being that a man can produce 
more than he can consume, the result is that little 
savings soon aggregate into wealth or capital, and 
that, by another natural law, this capital (which is 
only labour in a concentrated form) is gained and 
controlled by the more intelligent, careful, and pru- 
dent of the human family. All the riches of the 
world now existing, wherever and in whatever 
form — in metal, in houses, in temples, banks, rail- 
reads, or in any other work of man — represent sim- 
ply the accumulated and undestroyed labour, both 
that now being produced and that inherited from 
all ages of the world. And because this wealth 
can be so easily, and therefore has been so gener- 
ally made subservient to the lusts and vices of 
mankind, and has been almost universally per- 
verted from the good and beneficent uses it should 
have been made to serve, it has been fitly termed 
the " mammon of unrighteousness," and the faith- 
ful servant of God, when put in possession of that 
mammon, will never lack opportunity, through the 
temptations to evil that it offers, for full proof of 
his citizenship in that kingdom which " is not meat 
and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the 
Holy Ghost." " It is required in stewards that a 
man be found faithful," and if he has not been 
faithful in this unrighteous mammon given in 
his charge for a test of his fidelity, he has not 
become fitted for any higher trust, and cannot have 
the care or use of those spiritual treasures of high- 



Fidelity. 85 

est and enduring value that are to survive the 
chance and change of this life of probation. 

Then, again, this mammon is "another's" ; it is 
not our own either to use for self, to waste, to 
steal or suffer others to steal. In the false jargon 
of the world it may be called ours, we may be said 
to be worth so much, the lands may be called after 
our own names, and the sons of men give us the 
praise for gaining all these things, and honour us 
highly while keeping them in possession, and from 
such we should never get even a hint that they are 
not wholly ours and ours forever. But for us thus 
to do and live as owners, and not as stewards for 
the Divine Owner, would constitute a betrayal of 
our trust, and demonstrate that we are unfit to 
receive " that which is our own." The love, de- 
votion, care, and solicitude called into exercise 
through patient continuance in a w r ise administra- 
tion of our Master's goods are just the qualities to 
fit us rightly to administer our own, both in this 
life and in that to come ; because " our own," in 
either life, comprises none of the tangible, outward, 
material objects of sense or sight, but spiritual at- 
tainments gained through strivings and inner ex- 
periences, through victories over sin and self, through 
the spirit of honour, honesty, and love made regnant 
in our lives and triumphant by the grace of Him 
Who hath overcome and is seated upon His Father's 
throne. 

There is a progression of the argument in these 
10th, 11th, and 12th verses. 1st : Fidelity in the 
least can alone make possible fidelity in much, and 
unfaithfulness in the least inevitably brings about 



86 Four Bible Studies. 

unfaithfulness in much. 2d : Fidelity in the un- 
righteous mammon, which is the " least," renders 
one fit for the trust of that which is " true " riches. 
3d : All that Ave have here is not ours, but another's ; 
to Him Who has bought us with a price belong our 
every earthly possession, our every spiritual and 
mental endowment. In this day of probation we 
are actually owners of nothing ; all we are, all we 
have, is upon trust ; but with that day past, we enter 
into the enjoyment of " our own," acquired through 
many a hard spiritual strife, through much tribula- 
tion, watching, and prayer ; called no more to be 
servants, but made unto our God kings and priests, 
we will enter upon that incorruptible, undefiled, and 
unfading inheritance which, through the precious 
strivings of God's grace within, has been made our 
own. 

And now to take up the 13th verse, in which we 
have a general summing up of the lessons of the 
parable. " No servant can serve two masters ; for 
either he will hate the one, and love the other; or 
else he will hold to one, and despise the other. Ye 
cannot serve God and mammon." The effective 
element in all true service is love toward him 
whom we serve, whether that one be a divine or a 
human person. And there can be no middle nor 
any indifferent ground between love and hate. 
"He will love or he will hate" is the truth and 
rule declared by our Lord concerning all servants 
rendering service of every sort, whether earthly or 
heavenly. Into all true service, therefore, there 
enters a consideration above that of mere com- 
pensation on the ground of justice, right, and equity. 



Fidelity. s7 

We are not to serve for so much, and make the 
measure of our service rigidly conformable to the 
letter of the contract, careful to make it no more 
than what the measure of the recompense is to be ; 
we are to go beyond justice and right, and render 
more value in service than what our mere " pay " 
amounts to. For what is love in its outward and 
practical manifestation but the continual giving of 
our best in words and deeds and to an unbounded 
measure? And the servant, if he be true, must 
come under this law of love. Even in our own 
day, and under the hard conditions established 
between employers and employed, this law must 
prevail ; for the workman w T ho will not exercise 
more labour, more care and diligence for the benefit 
of his employer than are absolutely required under 
the strict letter of his contract, and who will not 
show a disinterested desire that his work shall be 
economically and thoroughly done, becomes thereby 
disqualified not only for future higher service, but 
even for use in his present position. There must 
be fully apparent in motive and act that conscien- 
tious concern for the interests of his employer 
which has its origin in a sentiment closely akin 
to that of love; there should be a self -forgetful 
absorption in his w r ork to make it always the best 
possible, and altogether without reference to the 
rate of the pay he is to receive. 

And, on the other hand, the employer to whom 
his employed are bound by no other tie than that 
of exact recompense for their work, and who will 
not endeavour to adjust their mutual relations upon 
some better lines than the hard ones of lowest pay 



88 Four Bible Studies. 

practicable for best work, will soon find that he is 
earning the costly hate rather than the profitable 
love of his men, and that he is getting no true ser- 
vice in the work thus done, not " upon honour," but, 
as it were, by compulsion ; if, in the hard grind of 
his selfish system, he takes no personal interest in 
the man who, through the pure motive of fidelity 
in his work, will give more value in labour and care 
than are agreed upon, then such an employer has 
mistaken his own best interests, and deserves to 
fail in the end. But he should always treat his 
men upon such lines of appreciative kindness and 
fairness as to deserve that love, or that respect and 
deference next to love, without which, in all the 
inequalities divinely ordained for this present life, 
no service can be rendered or received with mutual 
profit. Thus, with all the light and wisdom flood- 
ing our twentieth century now at hand, we yet live 
in barbarian darkness when that living is founded 
upon precepts or laws of purely equal service and 
recompense, upon mere justice and right, and not, 
rather, upon the all-powerful law of love. God is 
love, and His power is exerted omnipotently in all 
and upon all from that one impulse, love. Love 
upholds the "universe because it is utterly and con- 
tinually patient toward all the wrong done in it ; 
let, for a moment, any rule simply of justice or 
equity control, and the guilty earth would go back 
to chaos and destruction. 

The real cause of the unfaithfulness of the stew- 
ard was in his lack of love for his lord ; if he had 
loved him, then a natural and tender consideration 
for his master's interests would have stricken him 



Fidelity. 89 

with grief for his fault, would have led him to 
frankly confess it, to implore forgiveness, and 
promise an honest and careful service for the 
future. But the hollowness of all service without 
love is fully demonstrated by his case, in that he 
thinks not for a moment of such a course. In his 
" What shall I do ? " there is no intimation of the 
least sorrow for his wrong-doing, nor the slightest 
hint of any purpose to change his manner of life 
or manner of service. With that desperate hard- 
ness of the wicked man who is ever impelled still 
to follow a further wicked course by mere force of 
the guilt already incurred, he declares, " I am re- 
solved what to do," and thus indicates the hard, 
unhesitating selfishness of his heart, and the thinly- 
veiled hate he really entertained toward his lord. 
For, if any love, even the least, had been in him, 
it would seem so natural to us that he, like the 
servant who owed his lord ten thousand talents, 
should fall down at his feet and cry, " Forgive me, 
have patience with me, try me yet a little further 
and I will serve thee faithfully." Thus is the 
grand lesson illustrated to us, " Ye cannot serve 
God and Mammon." Love for God is the essential 
condition of service for Him ; we cannot serve if 
we do not love ; and if we love we cannot help 
serving Him. On the other hand, if we love mam- 
mon, we must serve that and hate God ; there is 
no possible alternative, and the word of God, which 
can never pass away, hath declared it. Thus love 
and service mutually prove and establish each 
other ; the golden thread of this doctrine can be 
easily traced through the web and woof woven by 



90 Four Bible Studies. 

many writers. Paul writes : " Faith worketh by 
love " ; James writes : " A man may say, Thou 
hast faith and I have works ; show me thy faith 
apart from thy works, and I by my works will 
show thee my faith." Faith and love are one ; 
where one is the other must be, and true service is 
the outcome of both or either. 

Then why, Blessed Jesus Christ, 

Should I not love Thee well, 
Not for the hope of winning Heaven, 

Nor of escaping hell ? 
Not with the hope of gaining aught, 

Nor seeking a reward, 
But as Tlryself hast loved me, 

ever-loving Lord ! 

By this new exegesis it is believed there is ob- 
tained a most natural solution of this parable ; there 
are no superfluous persons in the drama, and there 
is no unnecessary action by any of them ; there is 
nothing brought in not needed for illustration of 
the lessons intended to be taught ; and those are 
clear, of high spiritual import, and in perfect har- 
mony with all other teachings of our Lord. 



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